No Decrement in Visual P300 Amplitude During Extended Performance of the Oddball Task

Research indicates that in visual sustained attention paradigms, the amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related potential invoked by target (critical) stimuli shows a decrement in amplitude. This amplitude decrement parallels decrements in vigilance performance that result from the difficult discrimination that is typically required between the infrequent targets and the frequent nontargets (neutral stimuli). In contrast, target stimulus P300 does not appear to show a decrement across large numbers of trials during performance of the “oddball” paradigm, in which targets and nontargets are highly discriminable. The present study measured target and nontarget P300 amplitude during performance of a visual oddball paradigm extended over an interval of some 3 1/2 hours, a period well in excess of the 3/4 hour intervals employed in previous research. The results indicated no decrement in P300 amplitude as a function of time for either targets or nontargets. The only significant relationship between P300 and behavioral data was an inverse correlation across oddball runs between average nontarget P300 amplitude and total number of targets missed.