The second important advantage of electrophysiology methods is their excellent temporal resolution permitting the delineation of distinct stages of information processing in the brain (stimulus detection, categorization, response selection, error detection, etc.) that unfold within a period of less than on second. In contrast, the BOLD signal reaches its peak only about 5 seconds after the stimulus and takes 10 more seconds to return to baseline. Due to their ability to capture specific, short-living neural processes, electrophysiology methods can provide a better mechanistic understanding of cognitive processing and its impairment of disease. While fMRI is better suited to answer the question, where the information is processed, modern methods of EEG/ERP analysis are better suited to address the question of how the information is processed by the brain (Lorig, 2009). It is possible that some psychiatric disorders result from the impairment of mechanisms, such as precise temporal and spatial integration and coordination of activity in distributed networks, rather than impairment of a particular brain region.
