Elektrophysiologische Untersuchung zum 'reality monitoring' schizophrener Patienten mit akustischen Halluzinationen

Abstract

We studied the event related brain potentials of schizophrenic patients with acoustic hallucinations, schizophrenic patients without this symptom at time of examination and healthy controls in two memory tasks. First a simple recognition task and there after a reality monitoring -task, which requires the differentiation of selfgenerated and perceived memory contents, was done. Following the theory of C. Frith (1993) we expected schizophrenic patients with acoustic halluzinations to show poor memory performances especially for selfgenerated contents. This hypothesis could be confirmed for the behavioral data. The results of the event related brain potentials of schizophrenic patients with acoustic hallucinations show a lower activation and moreover a lower differentiation in the evoked potentials, leading to significant differences between groups for the P300 (200-400 ms) and the slow wave (400-800 ms). The results are discussed in reference to often described memory deficits in schizophrenic patients.