Effect of cue-target interval on endogenous attention in Go/No-Go task: evidence from an event-related potentials study

Previous researches found that inter stimulus interval (ISI) affected the amplitude and latency of P300 component in go/no-go task or oddball paradigm. Here we combined the cue-target paradigm with go/no-go task to investigate whether the cue-target interval (the time between cue-offset and target-onset) could affect the amplitude or latency of P300 component or not, when the central cue could completely predicts the target location, which induced totally endogenous attention. The results showed that the latency of P300 would not change in short (600ms) or long (1800ms) cue-target intervals conditions, indicating the endogenous attention worked on the target processing so that effect of different intervals on target processing was not significant. However, the mean amplitude of P300 (from 300ms to 600ms, after target onset) increased with the increasing cue-target interval, which supported that the temporal factor that was either target-target interval or cue-target interval, might determine the amplitude of P300.