Topographical Subcomponents of Electrical Brain Activity Allow to Identify Semantic Learning.

We investigated the change of event-related brain activity elicited by reading meaningful or meaningless Japanese symbols in 20 healthy German adults. In a learning phase of about 20 min, subjects acquired the meaning of 20 Kanji characters. As control stimuli 20 different Kanji characters were presented.

Total variation for the analysis of event-related potentials.

Background: Event-related potential waveforms are often analysed in the time-domain for changes of striking morphological features, like amplitudes or latencies of extrema, at the expense of missing less obvious changes in overall morphology.

New Method: The measure of total variation can capture a variety of changes in curve morphology. We show analytical examples, and the application to two sets of EEG data (n=41, n=19) difficult to analyse with more traditional methods.

Reconstruction of electroencephalographic data using radial basis functions.

Objective: In this paper we introduce a new interpolation method to use for scalp potential interpolation. The predictive value of this new interpolation technique (the multiquadric method) is compared to commonly used interpolation techniques like nearest-neighbour averaging and spherical splines.

Methods: The method of comparison is cross-validation, where the data of one or two electrodes is predicted by the rest of the data.

Olfactory and gustatory functions and its relation to body weight.

In the present study we investigated the influence of body weight as defined by BMI on gustatory and olfactory perception. A total of 66 healthy adults (41 females; 25 males) participated in psychophysical measurements using the "Sniffin' Sticks" test and "Taste Strips" test. Odor thresholds as well as discrimination and identification performance were determined.