Early Visual Sensory Deficits as Endophenotypes for Schizophrenia

Early visual sensory deficits as endophenotypes for schizophrenia: high-density electrical mapping in clinically unaffected first-degree relatives.

CONTEXT The imperative to establish so-called endophenotypes-quantifiable measures of risk for neurological dysfunction-is a growing focus of research in schizophrenia. Electrophysiological markers of sensory processing, observable in human event-related potentials, hold great promise in this regard, lying closer to underlying physiology than descriptive clinical diagnostic tests. OBJECTIVE E...

Visual sensory processing deficits in first-episode patients with Schizophrenia.

Early sensory contributions to contextual encoding deficits in schizophrenia.

CONTEXT The AX version of the visual continuous performance task (AX-CPT) is widely used for investigating visual working memory dysfunction in schizophrenia. Event-related potentials (ERP) provide an objective index of brain function and can be used to evaluate brain substrates underlying impaired cognition in schizophrenia. OBJECTIVE To assess the mechanisms that underlie visual working mem...

Evidence for sensory prediction deficits in schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE Patients with schizophrenia experiencing delusions and hallucinations can misattribute their own actions to an external source. The authors test the hypothesis that patients with schizophrenia have defects in their ability to predict the sensory consequences of their actions. METHOD The authors measured sensory attenuation of self-produced stimuli by patients with schizophrenia and ...

Early-stage visual processing and cortical amplification deficits in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in early-stage visual processing, potentially reflecting dysfunction of the magnocellular visual pathway. The magnocellular system operates normally in a nonlinear amplification mode mediated by glutamatergic (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors. Investigating magnocellular dysfunction in schizophrenia therefore permits evaluation of underlying e...