Visual Attention Selection Negativity in Schizophrenia

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Schizophrenia is a devastating mental illness that includes severe disturbances in patients' ability to allocate and sustain attention on behaviorally relevant information. Although attentional dysfunction is one of the root causes of the cognitive deficits and general impairments in information processing that are characteristic of persons afflicted with schizophrenia, the underlying neurophysiological substrates of these deficits are poorly understood. Numerous studies have attempted to characterize pathophysiology in the neuroanatomical visual pathways of schizophrenia patients. The findings from many of these converge to suggest that dysfunctional processing of the magnocellular system may give rise to subsequent high-order cognitive deficits in working memory, executive functioning and attention. The overall goal of this project is to utilize electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging measures of neural activity in order to delineate the neuroanatomical and temporal bases of selective visual attention deficits in schizophrenia patients and, in particular, how these deficits relate to sensory processing within the magnocellular and parvocellular visual pathways.