Cortical imaging of P300 component elicited by isolate words using different memory rehearsal strategies

The present study aims to identify topographic location of the neural sources underlying the verbal memory encoding, by cortical imaging analysis of the event-related potentials recorded from 11 healthy subjects participating in word encoding tasks. Both rote and elaborative strategies were used to memorize the words. The cortical potentials corresponding to the P300 component, which was elicited by the isolate words, were inversely estimated. The principal components analysis was further applied to extract major spatial components. The present results suggest that verbal memory encoding is subserved by different brain structures. Their different levels of activation may be correlated with recall performance, and may be affected by memory strategies.