Evoked Changes in the Rhythmic Activity of the Brain during Processing of Visually Presented Target, Nontarget, and Unknown Words

We report here our studies of the neurophysiological mechanisms of the processing of verbal information of different types: 1) known target words; 2) known nontarget words; 3) unknown words. Evoked changes in rhythmic activity (ECRA) in the cerebral cortex during performance of a stimulus categorization task were analyzed. As compared with unknown words, known target stimuli produced a high level of synchronization of electrical activity in the θ1 and θ2 ranges at the early stage, 150–300 msec after stimulus presentation, and in the δ range at 400–700 msec after stimulus presentation. At later stages, at 800–1500 msec, target stimuli produced less synchronization of the θ1 rhythm than known nontarget and unknown words, along with greater desynchronization in the θ2 and α ranges than known nontarget stimuli. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.