A repeated notion is that P3 abnormalities in schizophrenia are more robust and common with tasks using auditory than visual stimuli (e.g., Pfefferbaum et al., 1989; Egan et al., 1994; Ford et al., 1994; Jeon and Polich, 2003), which may be linked to a higher incidence of auditory than visual hallucinations (Ford, 1999), the close association between language and phonological representations (Crow, 2004a), or to systemic differences in processing visual or auditory information, particularly considering the neurophysiological aspects of temporal integration for sounds. When discussing the absence of a reduced old/new effect in schizophrenia during a visual word recognition memory task, we proposed to investigate whether the old/new effect is impaired in schizophrenia during an auditory word recognition memory task (Kayser et al., 1999). As ERP old/new effects have rarely been studied in the auditory modality, we developed and compared closely-matched auditory and visual continuous word recognition memory tasks in healthy adults in a within-subjects paradigm (Kayser et al., 2003, 2007). These studies revealed highly comparable old/new effects for both modalities despite prominent differences in scalp topography and peak latency
