An event-related brain potential substrate of disturbed response monitoring in paranoid schizophrenic patients

Response monitoring in schizophrenic patients and healthy controls was assessed by measuring performance and event-related brain potentials in the flanker priming task. Three visual-context conditions were construed: Flankers and targets pointed either into the same direction or into different directions. Stimuli without any response assignment were used as flankers in the neutral context condition. The schizophrenic patients were further subdivided into paranoid (n = 19) and nonparanoid (n = 10) patients and compared with healthy controls (n = 18). Performance scores revealed that the flankers induced a similar degree of distraction by visual context in all 3 groups. Although the schizophrenic patients showed normal error correction performance, the error negativity (NE) was significantly reduced in paranoid schizophrenic patients. The attenuation of the NE possibly reflects disturbed response monitoring in these patients.