| Serial order recall is a critical component for establishing temporal order of stimuli and interacting appropriately and effectively in the environment. Recent findings have demonstrated that deficits in serial order processing go beyond the pervasive general cognitive deficits seen in schizophrenia. A traditional oddball task was implemented to assess a key component of serial order processing. The novelty of this task lies in the utilization of electroencephalography (EEG) as an indicator of maintenance of serial order information in working memory, and potentially for differential degradation of working memory stores during specific processing conditions. As hypothesized, the amplitude of the P3 was greater in oddball trials compared to nonoddball trials across both processing conditions. In addition there was an interaction effect in which the amplitude of the P3 was larger when visual presentation had a brief delay, suggesting that extending the delay between target recognition increases cognitive demand and results in a more rapid "exhaustion" of the P3 system. Taken together these findings suggest that the novel task is both an effective means of eliciting the P3 and represent a new way of assessing serial order processing at a physiological level.;Keywords: Serial order recall, P3, working memory, event-related potentials, oddball paradigm. |
