In this regard, the new behavioral finding that manipulation of task difficulty (lag interval) was highly effective in the paradigm for faces but not words (cf. Kayser et al., 1999, 2003, 2007, 2009) offers an interesting interpretation. Encoding, storage and maintenance of verbal information in a phonological loop may be less affected by differences in lag, whereas this mechanism is largely unavailable for processing difficult-to-verbalize faces for which episodic memory decay is more critical. It seems then that healthy controls can benefit more than schizophrenic patients from accessing the phonological code, meaning that what is generally considered a deficit for patients is rather a selective advantage for controls. The similar late old/new effects for faces across groups, and for patients across tasks, are compatible with this post-hoc interpretation. It is also in line with recent ERP evidence suggesting that the phonological component of language processing may characterize a core deficit in schizophrenia (Angrilli et al., 2009).
