Background. N400 potential is a language-related neurophysiological brain research method. It is necessary to evaluate factors, influencing this potential in order to correctly interprete the results of analysis. One of these factors is the age of participants.
Aim of the study. The main aim of the research was to test whether there is statistically significant changes in latency and amplitude of N400 response related to age.
Materials and methods. Event-related potentials were recorded from 8 younger (M=23 years, SD=1.5) and 8 older (M=48 years, SD=7.8) adults as they performed a semantic mismatch task. Participants read 50 sentences appearing by one word displayed for 1 s at a time (e. g. “Yesterday it rained all day” or “Yesterday it rained all week”) foll owed by 5 s black screen during which decision whether the end of the sentence was appropriate to context was reported. Two N400 parameters - mean amplitude and peak latency were subjected to analysis.
Results. Comparison of the N400 parameters in two age groups showed de i crease of the amplitude by 3,76 ^V (or 0.15 |jV/year) and increase of peak latency by 39.15 ms (or 1.57 ms/year) with age.
Conclusions. The N400 event-related potential gets smaller and slower with age, and this change should be taken into consideration performing research of N400 response.
