Electrophysiological Correlates of Aberrant Motivated Attention and Salience Processing in Unaffected Relatives of Schizophrenia Patients.

Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) exhibit debilitating deficits in attention and affective processing, which are often resistant to treatment and associated with poor functional outcomes. Impaired orientation to task-relevant target information has been indexed by diminished P3b event-related potentials in patients, as well as their unaffected first-degree relatives, suggesting that P3b may be a vulnerability marker for schizophrenia. Despite intact affective valence processing, patients are unable to employ cognitive change strategies to reduce electrophysiological responses to aversive stimuli.

Investigating developmental changes in sensory processing: visual mismatch response in healthy children.

The ability to detect small changes in one's visual environment is important for effective adaptation to and interaction with a wide variety of external stimuli. Much research has studied the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN), or the brain's automatic response to rare changes in a series of repetitive auditory stimuli. But recent studies indicate that a visual homolog to this component of the event-related potential (ERP) can also be measured.

Attenuated auditory event-related potentials and associations with atypical sensory response patterns in children with autism.

Neurobiological underpinnings of unusual sensory features in individuals with autism are unknown. Event-related potentials elicited by task-irrelevant sounds were used to elucidate neural correlates of auditory processing and associations with three common sensory response patterns (hyperresponsiveness; hyporesponsiveness; sensory seeking). Twenty-eight children with autism and 39 typically developing children (4-12 year-olds) completed an auditory oddball paradigm.

Impaired neural synchrony in the theta frequency range in adolescents at familial risk for schizophrenia.

Puberty is a critical period for the maturation of the fronto-limbic and fronto-striate brain circuits responsible for executive function and affective processing. Puberty also coincides with the emergence of the prodromal signs of schizophrenia, which may indicate an association between these two processes. Time-domain analysis and wavelet based time-frequency analysis was performed on electroencephalographic (EEG) data of 30 healthy control (HC) subjects and 24 individuals at familial risk (FR) for schizophrenia.