Patients were compared to 20 healthy volunteers (15 men, 5 women) selected from a larger sample (N = 40) included in our previous report (Kayser et al., 2007). Control participants, who had been recruited from the New York metropolitan area and paid US$15/hr, were without a history of neurological illness or substance abuse and without current or past psychopathology based on a standard screening interview (SCID-NP; First, Spitzer et al., 1996). Importantly, patient and control participants had been tested under the same protocol and during the same time period. Without knowledge about their behavioral performance or ERP data, healthy adults were carefully matched to individual patients with regard to gender, age, and handedness (all participants were right-handed except for one ambidextral individual in each group; Table 1). Whereas patients had significantly less education than control participants, the available verbal IQ data (WAIS) suggested that the patients’ verbal skills were well within normal range.
