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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2023 Aug 4.
Published in final edited form as: Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2023 Apr 16;32(4):300–306. doi: 10.1177/09637214231162369

Figure 1. Age-related differences in EEG activity during perceptual decision-making tasks.

Figure 1

Manning et al. (2019) extracted two patterns of EEG activity (‘components’) when adults were making perceptual decisions about the overall direction of moving dots: a sustained component with maximal activity over centro-parietal electrodes (over the middle of the head) which gradually increased over time (upper left panel) and an earlier component with maximal activity over occipital electrodes (at the back of the head; lower left panel). Following previous work, these components were linked to the decision-making process and early sensory encoding of motion information, respectively. As shown in the rightward panels, the activity within both components showed age-related differences in amplitude and shape, with horizontal grey bars highlighting areas of significant differences between age groups. These results suggest that age-related changes in perceptual decisions are accompanied by both changes in early processes linked to sensory encoding and later decision-making processes. Adapted from Manning et al. (2019).