The effects of target tone frequency, presence of a masking stimulus, and subject sex on the auditory ERP were studied with an 'oddball' paradigm. P300 latency became shorter (about 15 msec) as the difference between the standard (1000 Hz) and target tone frequency increased (1500, 2000, 4000 Hz) but became longer (about 10 msec) with the presence of a white noise masking stimulus. Similar results were obtained for both the P3a and P3b subcomponents of the P300 potential. No significant differences between the adult male and female subjects were observed. The role of stimulus parameters in applied testing situations is discussed.

P300 latency from a simple auditory discrimination counting task was obtained along with a digit span memory task for a large group of neurologically normal subjects. Moderate significant negative correlations between the peak latency of the P3a and P3b subcomponents and total memory score were found, although no relationship was observed for other waveform component latencies and memory score. The data suggest that the P300 component of the event‐related brain potential may index individual variations in memory ability. Copyright © 1983, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved