Compared to healthy adults, patients having schizophrenia or schizophrenia-spectrum disorders showed poorer recognition memory for common words and unfamiliar faces, which is in accordance with evidence of impaired episodic memory in schizophrenia (e.g., Barch, 2005; Pelletier et al., 2005). The behavioral data, however, did not support the notion of a selective deficit of verbal learning and memory in schizophrenia (e.g., Saykin et al., 1991; Gur et al., 1994) because lower accuracy and longer response latency were observed in patients for words and faces alike. This negative finding, however, should be interpreted with caution, not only for statistical reasons (i.e., null hypothesis), but also because participants were excluded if their task performance was at chance so as to obtain adequate processing for both tasks, thereby avoiding the pitfall of a possible task disengagement when exploring electrophysiologic abnormalities. Still, the extent of this performance deficit for each task was highly comparable to that previously reported for schizophrenia patients during visual and auditory implementations of the continuous recognition memory paradigm using words (Kayser et al., 1999, 2009).
