Effects of continuous inclusion in a virtually played ball tossing game called Cyberball on the P300 event-related-potential

Diploma Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Psychology - General, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: The current study investigated effects of continuous social inclusion in a virtual ball tossing game on the P300 event-related potential based on a single trial analysis. Participants played an ostensible online game called Cyberball, which served as a social modification of the classical Oddball Paradigm. During the inclusion session, ball passes to the participant became more frequent over time from almost none to 33% at the very end of the game. Each participant had to ran an inclusion and an exclusion session. According to the order of experimental conditions, two inclusion-groups encompassing 15 datasets were taken for analysis. Of special interest was the centro-parietal P3b subcomponent that emerges 220ms-500ms after stimulus onset. The signal detection technique included template matching and cross-correlation. The data were analyzed twice: Once with the raw data, once preprocessed with the application of the Independent Component Analysis. Performances of the different approaches were compared and evaluated. Effects of target probability changes on the P300 amplitude were investigated. Further a linear fit and a model of local target probability were applied to account for P300 amplitude variations. Latencies were mainly examined to validate the methods of single trial estimations.