Comparison of P300 from a Passive Tone Sequence Paradigm and an Active Discrimination Task

The P300 (P3) event‐related potential elicited with a passive tone sequence paradigm was compared with an active auditory discrimination task. Each stimulus situation was replicated successively to study repetition effects. The first stimulus of the tone sequences produced a positive‐going potential with a scalp distribution and peak latency similar to the P3 from the active discrimination task, although its amplitude was smaller than that obtained from the active paradigm. The first block of trials demonstrated the strongest correlations for both P3 latency and amplitude between the sequence and discrimination tasks. The results suggest that the passive tone sequence paradigm may provide P3 measures which approximate those acquired from an active discrimination task.