In agreement with prior evidence of impaired verbal learning and memory in schizophrenia (e.g., Saykin et al., 1991; Gur et al., 1994; Mozley et al., 1996; Baving et al., 2000; Tendolkar et al., 2002; Barch, 2005), patients having schizophrenia or schizophrenia spectrum disorders showed poorer word recognition memory and increased response latencies than healthy adults during visual and auditory tasks. The extent of this deficit was comparable to that previously seen for schizophrenic patients for a visual version of the continuous recognition memory task (Kayser et al., 1999), and equal in size for auditory stimuli (cf. Kayser et al., 2003). Still, patients’ performance was adequate and well above chance for both modalities, rendering mere task disengagement an unlikely source for the observed electrophysiologic abnormalities.
