Sensory ERP Components

This chapter provides an overview of the main sensory evoked potentials of the auditory, somatosensory, and visual modalities. The short-latency sensory auditory, somatosensory, and visual evoked potentials are widely used in clinical practice, and their role in the context of event-related potential (ERP) studies is mostly as controls for the integrity of the sensory input to the central nervous system. Their description in this chapter therefore includes recording methods, waveform descriptions, and generators. The auditory middle-latency and long-latency components reflect cortical activity that often includes elements of cognitive processing of the sensory input. Their descriptions are therefore more detailed.