Objective: Patients with the unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS; formerly vegetative state) or in a minimally conscious state (MCS) open their eyes spontaneously but show no (UWS) or only marginal (MCS) signs of awareness. Because these states can become permanent, residual information processing capacities need to be determined, and reliable outcome predictors need to be found. We assessed higher-order cortical information processing in UWS or MCS in a large group of patients using electroencephalographic event-related potentials (ERPs) and determined their long-term prognostic value for recovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen people detect their own errors in a discrimination task, a negative-going waveform can be observed in scalp-recorded EEG that has been coined the error-related negativity (Ne/ERN). Generation of the Ne/ERN has been associated with structures in the prefrontal cortex, especially the anterior cingulate region, but also the supplementary motor cortex and subcortical structures. There is some controversy as to whether the Ne/ERN is a necessary concomitant to error detection.
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