Although visual and auditory N1 sink amplitudes were nominally smaller in schizophrenic patients than controls, there was no statistical support for these group differences, which is in agreement with our previous studies using visual word stimuli in the same recognition memory paradigm with nose-referenced ERPs (Kayser et al., 1999, footnote 6) and in a working memory tasks with CSD waveforms (Kayser et al., 2006). This suggests that reductions of early, mostly stimulus-driven ERP components in schizophrenia, which are frequently observed during simple auditory or visual tasks (e.g., Ford et al., 1994; Bruder et al., 1998; Kayser et al., 2001; Doniger et al., 2002; Clunas and Ward, 2005; Butler et al., 2007) and likely indicative of a deficit of attention or early perceptual processing (e.g., P50, MMN, P1, N1; cf. Javitt et al., 2008), were of subordinate importance to the deficits in later components observed during the more cognitively-demanding memory tasks. Nevertheless, while both groups showed left-larger-than-right visual N1 sinks over inferior-parietal sites, an asymmetry linked to the recognition of linguistic visual material (e.g., Dehaene, 1995; Hauk et al., 2006), this
