Schizophrenia disrupts normative covariation of neural activity across modalities of perception

Though schizophrenia is associated with disturbances in processing auditory and visual stimuli, it is unclear whether these anomalies reflect a shared abnormality in neural functions or modality-specific sensory impairments. It is also unclear to what degree these anomalies are associated with psychotic symptomatology or genetic risk for schizophrenia. We examined electrophysiological responses during auditory and visual target-detection tasks in probands with schizophrenia (SCZ, n = 107) and bipolar disorder (n = 62), first-degree biological relatives of SCZ (n = 62), and controls (n = 85). Principal components analyses of event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to evaluate (a) the covariation of ERPs across sensory modalities, (b) relationships with clinical and cognitive symptoms, and (c) associations with polygenic risk for schizophrenia. The covariance structure among ERPs for auditory and visual stimuli in controls revealed early, midlatency, and late components that were associated across sensory modalities. In SCZ, this covariation was disrupted with only midlatency components consistently covarying across modalities. SCZ also showed reduced ERP amplitudes across stages of visual processing and in late auditory processing. Reduced early and midlatency visual ERP components were associated with psychotic symptoms and polygenic risk, whereas reduced late auditory components were associated with lower cognitive performance. Neural responses reflecting separable stages of processing sensory stimuli covary across visual and auditory modalities. In schizophrenia, early sensory and late neural responses are independently disrupted within auditory and visual modalities, whereas reductions in midlatency neural responses are shared across modalities. Targeting midlatency neural responses may be advantageous in generalizing beneficial treatment effects across sensory modalities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).