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Averaged Evoked Responses and the Encoding of Perception
Author(s) -
Schwartz Marvin
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1976.tb00880.x
Subject(s) - psychology , stimulus (psychology) , perception , salience (neuroscience) , cognitive psychology , encode , information processing , affect (linguistics) , social psychology , audiology , communication , neuroscience , medicine , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
This paper reviews the hypothesis that averaged evoked response (AER) recordings encode the perception of stimulus content. AERs may be altered by changing subjects' expectancies, attention, affect, etc. AERs may also be altered by differences in the physical parameters of the eliciting stimuli. But if perception is viewed as the processing of the specific informational content of the stimuli, there is no convincing evidence that AERs encode perception. Thus, AKRs appear to be a summary of the activity of stimulus feature detectors and the results of decisions concerning the salience or importance of that information—AERs represent general operations not the specific content of the information being processed.