In our initial study, nose-referenced 30-channel ERPs were recorded from 24 schizophrenic patients and 19 healthy controls during a visual word recognition paradigm (Kayser et al., 1999). Despite poor word recognition performance, patients showed prominent old-new effects at medial-parietal sites between 400 and 700 ms, which were comparable to those of controls. In contrast, early negative potentials (N1, N2), as well as amplitude and asymmetry (left-greater-than-right) of the N2-P3 complex at inferior temporal-parietal sites, were markedly reduced in patients. Importantly, most of these ERP components correlated with performance accuracy in each group, suggesting a close relation of these electrophysiologic measures to word recognition memory processes.
