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Updated: Aug 7, 2026
Investigating the Effects of Antipsychotics and Schizotypy on the N400 Using Event-Related Potentials and Semantic Categorization
Published on: November 19, 2014
Early visual components (P100, N170) are disrupted in chronic schizophrenic patients: an event-related potentials
S Campanella1, C Montedoro, E Streel
1CHU de Brugmann, Psychiatry Service, Site Victor Horta, place Arthur Van Gehuchten 4, B-1020 Brussels, Belgium. salvatore.campanella@chu-brugmann.be
Introduction:
On the basis of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), fourteen schizophrenic patients and 7 normal controls were confronted with pictures from the Ekman & Friesen series in an event-related potentials study.
Procedure:
Participants were confronted with a visual face-detection task, in which they had to detect, as quickly as possible, deviant faces amongst a train of standard stimuli (neutral faces). Deviant faces changed either on identity (different identity, neutral expression), or on emotion (same identity, happy, fearful or sad expression).
Results:
Schizophrenics exhibited a decrease in amplitude of the face N170, recorded around 170 ms at occipito-temporal sites; this was observed as well for emotional as for identity faces, which suggests a global involvement of face processing. Moreover, this decrease of the face-N170 was positively correlated to positive, but not negative, symptoms of schizophrenia. Finally, the amplitude of P100 was also decreased, which suggests that the N170 decrement would result from a more global deficit in visual processing deficit.
Discussion:
It is suggested that, in schizophrenics, an involvement of early visual processing might underlie the decreased amplitudes and the higher onset latencies of later P300 and N400 components.
