Abstract: The congruity-plus-repetition paradigm is an exceeding paradigm from the traditional repetition paradigm, through adding semantic context in the beginning of each trial to control the interference between the early (N400) and late (P600) components. There are prominent advantages with this paradigm to be used in the filed of event-related potential (ERP) studies in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), as it facilitated the performance of MCI by implicit nature of task while could explore both implicit and explicit memory components. The leading conclusions are that P600 repetition effect is impaired markedly in MCI, and N400 repetition effect is abnormal in MCI to some extent. Furthermore, the combination of these two effects deserves further consideration as a biomarker for monitoring the progressing from normal memory aging to MCI and to dementia, and paradigms yielding more than one cognitive process – related ERP effects need to be developed in this field.

Key words: congruity-plus-repetition paradigm, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), N400 repetition effect, P600 repetition effect