Thus, the main purpose of the present study was to compare reference-independent old/new effects for visually-presented common words and unknown faces in a large sample of schizophrenia patients and healthy adults, taking full advantage of the previously-developed CSD-PCA approach and the existing findings for the continuous word recognition memory task. An additional aim was to increase the spatial resolution by using a dense 67-channel EEG montage to further refine the characterization of current generators underlying distinct visual ERP components (N1, N2, P3) and overlapping episodic memory effects. For this goal, we also employed randomization tests of component topographies as a new tool to evaluate statistical effects of interests (cf. Kayser et al., 2007), and to identify regions associated with well-known old/new effects in high-density ERPs without any a priori bias.1
