Cognitive neurophysiology: Event-related potentials

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are one of the most commonly used tools to assess cognitive processing with a high temporal resolution. We provide an updated view of the cortical origins of evoked responses and discuss potential mechanisms contributing to ERP generation. In particular, we focus on the relationship between evoked and ongoing oscillatory activity and discuss the differences between ERPs and cortical activation as indexed by high-frequency activity in human intracranial electroencephalography (EEG). We highlight several possibilities for how ERPs can precisely index human perception and behavior in nontraditional approaches, such as neuronal entrainment through steady-state evoked potentials, multivariate decoding, and cross-frequency correlations. We argue that analyses of time-locked responses are beneficial to assess nonlinear and nonsinusoidal neuronal activity on a fine-grained temporal scale, since analyses in the time domain are less susceptible to artifacts than spectral decomposition techniques. Taken together, the current review provides a state-of-the-art overview of ERPs and their application in cognitive and clinical neurophysiology.