SOME ELECROPHYSIOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF AFFECT AND MEMORY (P300, SLOW WAVE, LEARNING, VALUE, EMOTION)

Johnston (1979) has proposed that a component of the event related potential (ERP) may reflect the subjective value of a stimulus and has found that the specific component that reflects this value is P3. He further demonstrated that the P3 component to a stimulus with no value increases as a subject learns the relationship between this event and stimuli with monetary value (Johnston and Holcomb, 1980). This study is another test of the subjective value hypothesis using complex pictures that were selected to differ in affective value. The subject's task was to learn the relationship between neutral stimuli (consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams) and the pictures in a paired associates learning paradigm. It was expected that P3 would reflect subjective value of the complex stimuli and increase in magnitude to the CVCs as a function learning.;An increase in the P3 component was found as a function of the increasing picture affect, a finding that supports the subjective value hypothesis. A second positive component (P4) for the picture ERP was also recorded, which appeared to be less related to affect and to be more a function of the task requirements. A weak relationship between affect and learning was found. An examination of the evoked responses to CVCs showed that P3 was relatively stable, but that a later positive component, P4, increased with learning. The implications of these findings are discussed.