Event-related brain potentials during visual sentence reading and picture recognition memory tasks

It is uncertain if different brain areas in response to pre-semantic picture processing are functionally homogeneous. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we aimed to explore the neural activities in different brain regions in relation to processing of sentence memory and picture identification. Healthy subjects were chosen to discriminate visual stimulus pairs, and the ERPs were recorded from the scalp. Two kinds of stimuli were provided for each subject in the present study. One was Chinese sentence reading, referred as task 1. Another one was watching a line-drawing picture to judge if the picture matched the meaning of the sentence before. When the line-drawing picture received by the subject was inconsistent with the meaning of the sentence before, it was called as task 2, otherwise, if incongruous, it was called as task 3. Our findings implicate that stimuli of sentence memory and picture identification may exert neural activities on different working memory areas in the brain of human.