Frontal P3 Potential as a Supramodal Marker of Imminent Attentional Lapses

Abstract

Focusing on an organisms task at hand is instrumental for intelligent and goal-driven behavior. However, humans and other animals often fail to pay sustained attention across long time intervals. Failing to stay on-task may cause one to miss crucial task-relevant signals, leading to impaired performance, which can have serious consequences. Therefore, it is important to understand the neural basis of attentional lapses. One promising neural marker of attentional lapses is the frontal P3 (fP3) EEG component, which has been suggested to reflect the susceptibility to incoming sensory input. Following this, we hypothesized that the fP3 1) predicts imminent lapses of attention, and 2) that it should predict upcoming lapses of attention across modalities. In two experiments, we found that the fP3 reliably tracked lapses of attention of sustained attention already seconds preceding the crucial visual signal. We further extended this to the auditory domain: Already 1.5s ahead of the incoming auditory target, the fP3 revealed whether that target was detected or not. Detailed topographic analyses did, however, reveal a slight dissociation between modalities in underlying intracranial source configurations. In sum, this work revealed a supramodal neural signature of susceptibility, which tracks lapses of sustained attention seconds ahead of the critical incoming sensory input.