Electrophysiological Investigation of Episodic Encoding in Schizophrenia

Besides psychiatric symptoms, deficits in episodic memory are frequently experienced in people with schizophrenia. Memory involves encoding, storage, and retrieval. While all three stages are important, information has to be accurately encoded before they can be stored and retrieved.1 Even though there have been reports that described changes in brain activation while performing an episodic encoding task in schizophrenia, very little is known about the time dimension of these cognitive processes. The event-related potential (ERP) technique is well suited for the temporal and precise measurement of the brain electrical activities resulting from cognitive processes because of its resolution at millisecond scale.