Behavioral and Electrophysiological Correlates of Context Processing in Individuals with Schizophrenia and Their First-Degree Relatives

Context processing has been proposed to describe the cognitive process of updating, maintaining and integrating contextual information to guide one's decisions. Impairment in this process has been proposed to be a process-specific cognitive deficit in individuals with schizophrenia. Mild deficits in context processing have also been found in healthy first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia. Previous research using behavioral and neuroimaging methodology has found evidence to support the theory of a specific deficit of context processing in schizophrenia. However, research using electrophysiological methodology has been less frequent. Recent research in this area suggested that impairment in early sensory processes (P1 and N1) primarily contributes to behavioral impairment in context processing. The current study investigated early sensory processing and later cognitive processing in individuals with schizophrenia and their healthy first-degree relatives. Between-group differences were found for both early (P1) and later (P3) cognitive components. However, only later cognitive processes (N2 and the contingent negative variation, CNV) predicted impaired context processing performance in individuals with schizophrenia. This relationship was not present in early sensory components, indicating that in this sample, impaired context processing was not associated with deficits in early sensory processing. Relationships between neural synchrony and behavioral performance were also investigated. Significant differences in neural synchrony were found between the schizophrenia and control samples. Additionally, significant relationships between neural synchrony and behavioral performance were found in the schizophrenia and relative samples.