ABSTRACT
The study of cognition in schizophrenia may not only contribute to the understanding of the pathophysiology of the disorder, but may also elucidate the neural and cognitive mechanism of mental processes in general by showing how cognitive dysfunctions arise out of changes in the underlying brain processes. Auditory verbal hallucinations, perceptions of voices in the absence of external stimuli, are a fundamental feature of psychotic illness and one of the principal symptoms of schizophrenia. Visual short-term memory entails mental operations in the absence of sensory stimulation. In the delayed-discrimination task a number of images has to be maintained over a delay period until a probe stimulus is presented and the subject has to decide whether it matches one of the sample items or not. While functional magnetic resonance imaging provides a good spatial resolution, electroencephalography has an excellent temporal resolution and provides the direct link to the invasive electrophysiological methods used by other groups in the department.
