Event-related potentials during arithmetic and mental rotation.

In separate studies of arithmetic and mental rotation, similar posterior negative slow waves have been found. This similarity was surprising given the difference in cognitive processing required by these tasks. Furthermore, delayed responses were employed in these studies, so that it was not possible to determine the extent to which the slow wave activity was too late to be associated with processing that was specific to performance of the tasks. This experiment was intended to clarify the task-specific and non-specific nature of the slow wave activity. Subjects performed either an arithmetic or mental rotation task at two levels of difficulty on a random, trial-to-trial basis and gave an immediate response. There were a number of late posterior negativities, each with a different timing and topography, which were sensitive to type of task and/or task difficulty. Some components were associated with early task processing that was synchronized to the stimulus while others, revealed by response-synchronized averaging, were associated with later stages of task processing. There also was post-task activity that was sensitive to the difficulty level of the prior operations. In both tasks, there was a pre-frontal positive wave that persisted over most of the pre-response epoch, evidently related to a process that was active throughout the task. There also was centro-frontal phasic negativity, with a large peak at 380 msec in mental rotation, and a smaller, longer latency peak in arithmetic, apparently related to the complexity of the stimulus. Thus we conclude that arithmetic and mental rotation each elicit task-specific slow wave activity.