An event-related potential study on cognition of competitive results

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from subjects with higher and lower competitiveness performing a reaction time task which required them to compete with visible opponent or with invisible one, to investigate the characteristics of processing of results in competitive situation. The effects of competitiveness and visibility of opponent on P300 and N400 were determined, as P300 is an useful index for allocation of attention and N400 is regarded to reflect semantic processing. The P300 amplitudes of winning trials were larger than those of losing trials, reflecting more attention to winning, and the N400 amplitudes of losing trials were larger than those of winning trials, because of incongruity of the aim and the result of competition. The P300 amplitudes of the higher competitive subjects were smaller than those of the lower competitive subjects, especially when competing with visible opponent. The higher competitive subjects had larger amplitudes of P300 when competing with invisible opponent than with visible one, whereas, there was no difference between P300 amplitudes of lower competitive subjects with visible opponent and with invisible one. These indicated that higher competitive person might be not only dependent on the presentation of result, but also attempt to estimate the result using the other information, for example, the comparison of their performances with their opponents' ones. The N400 amplitudes of the higher competitive subjects were more enhanced than those of the lower competitive subjects. This indicated that the higher competitive subjects might execute feedback processing to integrate their performances and the results, more than lower competitive subjects. These findings suggested that people would be generally engaged in competition desiring to win, therefore, and execute additional information processing to improve next performance, and that higher competitive person would weight the result of competition and execute active processing continuously, compared to lower competitive person.