Perception is one of the psychological operations that can be analyzed from the point of view of microgenetic theory. Our study tests the basic premise of microgenesis theory – the existence of recurrent stages of visual information processing. The event related potentials in two variants of a cued GO/NOGO task (contrasting images of Animals and Plants in the first variant, and contrasting images of Angry and Happy faces in the second variant) were studied during the first 300 ms following stimulus presentation. The independent component analysis was applied to a large collection of ERPs. The functional independent components associated with visual category discrimination, comparison to working memory, action initiation and conflict detection were separated. Information processing in the ventral visual stream (the temporal independent components) occurs at two sequential stages with positive/negative fluctuations of the cortical potential as indexes of the stages. The first stage represents the comparison of the pure physical features of the visual input with the memory trace. The second stage represents the comparison of more sophisticated semantic/emotional features with the working memory. The two stages are the results of interplay between bottom-up and top-down projections in the visual ventral stream.
The aim of this study was to examine the neurophysiological correlates of cognitive dysfunctions in a patient with the minimally verbal variant of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD + MV), who after reaching adulthood showed progressive deterioration of his cognitive skills. The patient was a 25-year-old male, diagnosed with ASD. He never developed spoken language, and communicated only by gesturing or writing on a computer. Our findings confirmed comorbidity of ASD and epilepsy, accompanied by dysfunction of cognitive control. We also found that spontaneous EEG and event-related potentials (ERPs) in a cued GO/NOGO task can be used to assess functional brain changes concomitant with ASD.
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