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N400 and automatic semantic processing abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia.

Daniel H Mathalon1, William O Faustman, Judith M Ford

  • 1Department of Psychiatry, VA Connecticut Healthcare System, West Haven 06516, USA. daniel.mathalon@yale.edu

Archives of General Psychiatry
|July 2, 2002
PubMed
Summary

Patients with schizophrenia show abnormal N400 event-related potentials, indicating overly broad semantic network activation. This suggests a potential neural basis for thinking disturbances in schizophrenia, impacting how words are processed.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Psychiatric Disorders
  • Neuroscience of Language

Background:

  • Schizophrenia is associated with thinking disturbances, potentially linked to abnormal semantic network activation.
  • The N400 event-related potential (ERP) measures semantic processing and can assess automatic spreading activation.
  • Semantic priming, the facilitation of word processing by context, can be automatically or strategically influenced.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate automatic spreading activation in semantic networks of patients with schizophrenia using N400 ERPs.
  • To compare N400 responses to primed and unprimed words in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls.

Main Methods:

  • A picture-word matching task was employed with healthy controls and schizophrenia patients.

Related Experiment Videos

  • N400s were recorded in response to exactly matched (primed) and remotely related (unprimed) words.
  • A short stimulus-onset asynchrony (325 ms) was used to emphasize automatic semantic activation.

    • Main Results:

    • Schizophrenia patients exhibited a significantly smaller N400 to unprimed words compared to controls.
    • Behavioral measures indicated normal semantic priming in patients.
    • N400 amplitudes to primed words did not differ between patients and controls.

    Conclusions:

    • Reduced N400 to unprimed words in schizophrenia suggests inappropriate priming from remotely related semantic contexts.
    • This finding supports the hypothesis of overly broad automatic spreading activation in semantic networks in schizophrenia.
    • Abnormal semantic network activation may contribute to cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.