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Abstract
Topographic differences in Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) were recorded while
people were preparing for cognitive versus motor tasks in an S1-S2 paradigm. CNV had
a frontal distribution when people prepared to encode words into long-term memory,
whereas CNV was more centrally distributed when the tasks were predominantly motoric.
These topographic differences appeared to be related to the type of task rather than
the amount of information extracted from the S2, because a direct manipulation of
the level of S2 processing had little effect on CNV amplitude. The topographic differences
in CNV suggest that preparation for motor activity is a different psychological process
from preparation for stimulus processing and that these two processes are subserved
by different neural structures. This experiment also demonstrated that a recognition
memory paradigm can be useful in the investigation of the psychological correlates
of CNV.