the current patient sample, with a majority being of paranoid subtype (n = 11), are of interest in light of previous reports linking reduced ERN to paranoid schizophrenia patients (Kopp and Rist, 1999; Mathalon et al., 2002). However, subtyping with small samples is likely to be problematic because of unpredictable differences in other variables (e.g., gender, age, etc.), thereby severely limiting the ability to draw valid conclusions. Because most of the current patients were off medication during testing (n = 11), it is unlikely that the observed recognition memory deficits and associated electrophysiologic abnormalities were a mere byproduct of drug treatment, and this appears to be a widely-accepted notion (cf. Barch, 2005). The adequate task performance of patients and confining the ERP/CSD analysis to correct trials, combined with a distinct ERP/CSD component structure in patients indicative of modality-specific activation of auditory and visual processing streams, strongly suggest that our findings are indicative of impaired word recognition memory processing in schizophrenia.
