Definition
Event-related potentials (ERPs) are time locked and stereotyped brain responses to some “event.” An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain electrophysiological response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event. The stimulus can be a sound, a simple visual pattern, a mental event, or thoughts such as recognition of a specific target stimulus or the absence of a stimulus as when an increased time elapses between stimuli. The recorded brain response is a very small electrical voltage of between 1 and 100 millionths of a volt and is recorded over the scalp by a very sensitive amplifier and computer averaging equipment that can recognize it as a consistency in the seemingly random waveforms of the overlying EEG.
The response can be a singular waveform or a series of waveforms that indicate the chain of processors that respond in sequence to the stimulus as the...
References and Readings
Sur, S., & Sinha, V. K. (2009). Event-related potential: An overview. Industrial Psychiatry Journal, 18(1), 70–73.
Vernet, M., Bashir, S., Enam, S. F., et al. (2013). Electrophysiologic techniques. In N. D. Zasler, D. I. Katz, & R. Zafonte (Eds.), Brain injury medicine: Principles and practice. Demos Medical. New York. (pp. 230–246).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Samuels, J., Zasler, N.D. (2017). Event-Related Paradigms. In: Kreutzer, J., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_27-2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_27-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56782-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56782-2
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences