In electroencephalography, the P50 is an event related potential occurring approximately 50 ms after the presentation of a stimulus, usually an auditory click. [1] The P50 response is used to measure sensory gating, or the reduced neurophysiological response to redundant stimuli.
Research has found an abnormal P50 suppression in people with schizophrenia, making it an example of a biological marker for the disorder. [2] [3] Besides schizophrenia, abnormal P50 suppression has been found in patients with traumatic brain injury, recreational drug use, and post-traumatic stress disorder. [4]
In a paired click test, one auditory click sound will be presented, followed by a second click approximately 500 ms after the first one. The second sound is considered redundant, and so a typical control showing normal sensory gating will produce a reduced response (in wave amplitude) to the second click. The suppression is measured as the percentage of amplitude decrease in response to the second click compared to the first click, with typical controls showing an approximately 80% decrease to the second stimulus. [5] This response is recorded at the scalp and represents a pre-attentive process of sensory gating. [1]
Healthy infants as young as 1 to 4 months old were found to demonstrate a P50 suppression in a paired click task, suggesting that sensory gating is present early in development. [4]
Studies have found that patients with schizophrenia fail to show a reduced response to the second click. [4] Abnormal sensory gating may be behind symptoms of schizophrenia such as sensory overload and difficulty concentrating. [6]
A link exists between abnormal α7 receptors and the abnormal P50 response. [7]
In a family that has a child with schizophrenia, at least one of the parents tends to show higher rates of abnormal P50 gating compared to normal controls even when the parents themselves do not have schizophrenia. [7]
Abnormal P50 suppression in paired click tests can be found through either a failure to suppress the second stimulus, or as a failure to produce a heightened response to the first stimulus. Some studies suggest that P50 suppression in people with schizophrenia might instead appear as a smaller response to the first auditory stimulus. [5]
Psychosis is an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior that is inappropriate for a given situation. There may also be sleep problems, social withdrawal, lack of motivation, and difficulties carrying out daily activities. Psychosis can have serious adverse outcomes.
A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the qualities of a real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space. They are distinguishable from several related phenomena, such as dreaming, which does not involve wakefulness; pseudohallucination, which does not mimic real perception, and is accurately perceived as unreal; illusion, which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception; and imagery (imagination), which does not mimic real perception, and is under voluntary control. Hallucinations also differ from "delusional perceptions", in which a correctly sensed and interpreted stimulus is given some additional significance. Many hallucinations happen also during sleep paralyses.
An evoked potential or evoked response is an electrical potential in a specific pattern recorded from a specific part of the nervous system, especially the brain, of a human or other animals following presentation of a stimulus such as a light flash or a pure tone. Different types of potentials result from stimuli of different modalities and types. EP is distinct from spontaneous potentials as detected by electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), or other electrophysiologic recording method. Such potentials are useful for electrodiagnosis and monitoring that include detections of disease and drug-related sensory dysfunction and intraoperative monitoring of sensory pathway integrity.
Anhedonia is a diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure. While earlier definitions emphasized the inability to experience pleasure, anhedonia is currently used by researchers to refer to reduced motivation, reduced anticipatory pleasure (wanting), reduced consummatory pleasure (liking), and deficits in reinforcement learning. In the DSM-5, anhedonia is a component of depressive disorders, substance-related disorders, psychotic disorders, and personality disorders, where it is defined by either a reduced ability to experience pleasure, or a diminished interest in engaging in pleasurable activities. While the ICD-10 does not explicitly mention anhedonia, the depressive symptom analogous to anhedonia as described in the DSM-5 is a loss of interest or pleasure.
The Fregoli delusion is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise. The syndrome may be related to a brain lesion and is often of a paranoid nature, with the delusional person believing themselves persecuted by the person they believe is in disguise.
An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event. More formally, it is any stereotyped electrophysiological response to a stimulus. The study of the brain in this way provides a noninvasive means of evaluating brain functioning.
A gamma wave or gamma Rhythm is a pattern of neural oscillation in humans with a frequency between 25 and 140 Hz, the 40-Hz point being of particular interest. Gamma rhythms are correlated with large scale brain network activity and cognitive phenomena such as working memory, attention, and perceptual grouping, and can be increased in amplitude via meditation or neurostimulation. Altered gamma activity has been observed in many mood and cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, and schizophrenia.
Sensory overload occurs when one or more of the body's senses experiences over-stimulation from the environment. There are many environmental elements that affect an individual. Examples of these elements are urbanization, crowding, noise, mass media, technology, and the explosive growth of information.
Sensory gating describes neural processes of filtering out redundant or irrelevant stimuli from all possible environmental stimuli reaching the brain. Also referred to as gating or filtering, sensory gating prevents an overload of information in the higher cortical centers of the brain. Sensory gating can also occur in different forms through changes in both perception and sensation, affected by various factors such as "arousal, recent stimulus exposure, and selective attention.
The mismatch negativity (MMN) or mismatch field (MMF) is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an odd stimulus in a sequence of stimuli. It arises from electrical activity in the brain and is studied within the field of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. It can occur in any sensory system, but has most frequently been studied for hearing and for vision, in which case it is abbreviated to vMMN. The (v)MMN occurs after an infrequent change in a repetitive sequence of stimuli For example, a rare deviant (d) stimulus can be interspersed among a series of frequent standard (s) stimuli. In hearing, a deviant sound can differ from the standards in one or more perceptual features such as pitch, duration, loudness, or location. The MMN can be elicited regardless of whether someone is paying attention to the sequence. During auditory sequences, a person can be reading or watching a silent subtitled movie, yet still show a clear MMN. In the case of visual stimuli, the MMN occurs after an infrequent change in a repetitive sequence of images.
An auditory hallucination, or paracusia, is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus.
The contingent negative variation (CNV) is the reaction time between a warning and a go signal as measured by electroencephalography (EEG). The CNV was one of the first event-related potential (ERP) components to be described. The CNV component was first described by W. Grey Walter and colleagues in an article published in Nature in 1964. The importance of this finding was that it was one of the first studies which showed that consistent patterns of the amplitude of electric responses could be obtained from the large background noise which occurs in EEG recordings and that this activity could be related to a cognitive process such as expectancy.
Pierre Flor-Henry is a Canadian psychiatrist, researcher, lecturer, and professor. His most important initial contribution was the demonstration in the study of epileptic psychosis, that schizophrenia relates to left and manic-depressive states relate to right hemisphere epilepsies.
In genetic epidemiology, endophenotype is a term used to separate behavioral symptoms into more stable phenotypes with a clear genetic connection. The concept was coined by Bernard John and Kenneth R. Lewis in a 1966 paper attempting to explain the geographic distribution of grasshoppers. They claimed that the particular geographic distribution could not be explained by the obvious and external "exophenotype" of the grasshoppers, but instead must be explained by their microscopic and internal "endophenotype".
In neuroscience, the N100 or N1 is a large, negative-going evoked potential measured by electroencephalography ; it peaks in adults between 80 and 120 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus, and is distributed mostly over the fronto-central region of the scalp. It is elicited by any unpredictable stimulus in the absence of task demands. It is often referred to with the following P200 evoked potential as the "N100-P200" or "N1-P2" complex. While most research focuses on auditory stimuli, the N100 also occurs for visual, olfactory, heat, pain, balance, respiration blocking, and somatosensory stimuli.
The P3b is a subcomponent of the P300, an event-related potential (ERP) component that can be observed in human scalp recordings of brain electrical activity. The P3b is a positive-going amplitude peaking at around 300 ms, though the peak will vary in latency from 250 to 500 ms or later depending upon the task and on the individual subject response. Amplitudes are typically highest on the scalp over parietal brain areas.
The oddball paradigm is an experimental design used within psychology research. Presentations of sequences of repetitive stimuli are infrequently interrupted by a deviant stimulus. The reaction of the participant to this "oddball" stimulus is recorded.
The mechanisms of schizophrenia that underlie the development of schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder, are complex and not clearly understood. A number of hypotheses including the dopamine hypothesis, and the glutamate hypothesis have been put forward in an attempt to explain the link between altered brain function and the symptoms and development of schizophrenia. Proposed models are separate from the proposed causes, which deal with the risk factors that may lead to schizophrenia.
Visual processing abnormalities in schizophrenia are commonly found, and contribute to poor social function.
Research into the mental disorder of schizophrenia, involves multiple animal models as a tool, including in the preclinical stage of drug development.