Cortical inhibitory deficits as a core feature of schizophrenia: electrophysiological and neurocognitive studies

The main objective of this project is to make a substantial contribution to the description and understanding of cortical inhibitory deficit in schizophrenia by using a combination of clinical, electrophysiological and neurocognitive methods.

Specifically, the aims of the study are to:

• undertake a detailed examination of antisaccade performance in schizophrenia patients on different paradigms including overlap, delayed and memory-guided antisaccade
• examine sensory gating occurring at the P50, N100 and P200 phases of information processing in schizophrenia patients
• investigate the performance of schizophrenia patients on a spatial working memory task
• compare the performance of patients classified into different schizophrenia subtypes (cognitive deficits and cognitively spared subtypes) on the above tasks
• develop a composite model comprising inhibitory functions and spatial working memory, and test the model’s capacity to discriminate between subtypes of schizophrenia

This study is a part of the Western Australian family study of schizophrenia and is being supervised by Professor Assen Jablensky.

Contact

Chief investigator Shahrzad Mazhari Phone: +61 8 9347 6404