The present study was conducted to take full advantage of the combined CSD-PCA technique for distinguishing and quantifying the separate contributions of cognitive and response-related factors to ERP asymmetries in schizophrenic patients and healthy controls during auditory target detection tasks. The study design provides a direct “within-subjects” comparison of N2/P3 amplitude and asymmetry during left button press, right button press, and silent count target detection tasks, and provides information on whether response mode effects modulate patient-control differences in N2 and P3 asymmetry. Moreover, the use of both phonetic and tonal oddball tasks is of particular value for further testing hypotheses of left temporal lobe dysfunction in schizophrenia (e.g.,17,46,47).
