P3a, perceptual distinctiveness, and stimulus modality.

A three-stimulus oddball paradigm (target, standard, nontarget) was employed in which subjects responded to an infrequent target, when its discrimination from the frequent standard was difficult. In separate auditory and visual modality conditions, the stimulus characteristics of an infrequent nontarget were manipulated such that its perceptual distinctiveness from the target was varied systematically. For both the low and high distinctiveness conditions, target stimulus P300 amplitude was larger than the nontarget only at the parietal electrode. In contrast, nontarget P3a amplitude was larger and earlier than the target P300 over the frontal/central electrode sites. The distinctiveness manipulation between the target and nontarget produced larger P3a component profiles for the auditory compared to visual stimuli. The results support previous findings that target/standard stimulus context determines P3a generation for both auditory and visual stimulus modalities and suggest that the distinctiveness of the eliciting stimulus contributes to P3a amplitude. Theoretical implications are discussed.