in a 3-stimulus oddball task (Polich and Criado, 2006). Novel distracter stimuli (e.g., environmental sounds) elicit a short latency “novelty P3” with a frontocentral distribution, which is indistinguishable from the P3a potential (Spencer et al., 1999; Simons et al., 2001). The P3a or novelty P3 is thought to reflect frontal attention mechanisms, whereas P3b reflects temporal–parietal activity associated with context updating and subsequent memory storage (Polich, 2007).
