Abstract
Patients with schizophrenia are known to have behavioral deficits in recognizing faces and facial expressions. However, the ability to process simple visual stimuli appears to be intact in first-episode psychosis.
The aim of this study was to examine complex visual processing, especially the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by human faces, in early psychosis. Never-medicated patients in acute psychosis (n = 18) were compared with healthy controls (n = 19).
Photographs of human faces were presented in a classic oddball paradigm requiring a motor response to a smiling face. Cerebral sources of ERPs were analyzed of the averaged responses, using minimum norm estimates, and dipole models.
Face-sensitive response at 145 ms after the face stimuli was of significantly higher amplitude in our never-medicated patients, and the activity distribution between the groups was clearly different.