The theta ERO occurring in the P3 response to target stimuli in the visual oddball experiment has been shown to have significant genetic associations with genetic variants of several different genes encoding neurophysiologically significant factors (Jones et al., 2006b; Chen et al., 2009; Zlojutro et al., 2011; Kang et al., 2012). No other neurophysiological measure has been found to have this span of genetic association. This suggests that a developmental study of the theta ERO would be a useful preliminary to any study of the genetics of the development of neurophysiological function. The development of theta band EROs during adolescence have not previously been studied, although previous studies have examined the pattern of the development of visual and auditory P3 peak amplitude in adolescents (Katsanis et al., 1996; Hill et al., 1999a; Stige et al., 2007; Nanova et al., 2008; van Beijsterveldt et al., 1998, 2001; Carlson and Iacono, 2006; Sumich et al., 2012). No developmental studies of neurophysiological function have attempted to characterize trajectories of any measure of task-related activity in the temporal detail provided here.
