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Abstract
The present study examined latent inhibition (LI) effects in 17 acute and 16 partially
remitted schizophrenic patients, and in 20 healthy controls, by measuring manual response
latencies and event-related potentials (ERPs) during an association learning task.
ERPs were recorded to elucidate the role of attention in the LI effect. Subjects performed
a go/no-go task with an auditory conditional stimulus predicting a visual go command.
Half of the subjects in each diagnostic group were pre-exposed to the conditional
stimulus which had been used as an irrelevant distractor in a preceding discrimination
task. Independent of diagnostic group membership, pre-exposed subjects showed slower
manual responses to go stimuli than non-pre-exposed subjects, reflecting a robust
LI effect. The N100 wave after the conditional stimuli, however, showed a differential
pattern: pre-exposure increased N100 amplitudes in acute schizophrenics, whereas pre-exposed
control subjects showed a trend for decreased N100. The amplitude of the contingent
negative variation (CNV) was unaffected by pre-exposure. The ERP results suggest that
acute schizophrenics have a deficit in learned inattention to irrelevant stimuli.
However, the intact LI effect in schizophrenics at the motor speed level shows that
human LI is a complex phenomenon depending on the tasks and measures used.