The Time Course of Human Inductive Strength Judgment: An ERP Study

The temporal characteristics of human inductive strength judgment process have not been previously investigated, although some preliminary spatial localization results have been reported. In the present study, some Chinese verbal inductive reasoning tasks are used in ERP (event related potentials) experiments to explore the time course of inductive strength judgment. The experimental results confirm our expectation. Inductive strength judgment after the presentation of a conclusion mainly contains three stages: visual encoding, semantic information integration, and strength evaluation. It can be tentatively concluded that visual encoding may be observed at the frontal P200 and the posterior N200, and the frontal LNC and the posterior LPC may reflect semantic information integration, and the slow waves after about 650ms may relate to strength evaluation process.