Eye Blink Response in Healthy Volunteers and Adults With Schizophrenia

Eyeblink conditioning is a paradigm that allows the study of aspects of the neural mechanism of memory in humans. This paradigm has been extensively studied in animals and human beings and its functional neuroanatomy appears to be well understood, involving the hippocampus and cerebellum. The performance on this task is most likely independent of subject motivation. Moreover, manipulation of the intervals between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli allows to study subliminal forms of mnemonic encoding ("delay" task) as well as learning that is associated with conscious awareness ("trace" task). This makes eyeblink conditioning particularly suited for study in patient populations, and particularly in schizophrenia where motivation and attention are frequently confounding factors in the study of memory processes. Patients with schizophrenia have been reported to have hippocampal and possibly cerebellar structural and functional abnormalities, however eyeblink conditioning has been minimally studied in this patient population. We expect implicit forms of memory (cerebellum dependent) to be relatively spared as compared to declarative memory (hippocampus dependent) in schizophrenia. We would like to test the hypothesis that patients with schizophrenia have deficits in acquiring the trace form of the task as opposed to the delay, where we assume they would be unimpaired as compared to normal controls. We would also like to study heart rate and skin conductance changes that occur during conditioning, since patients with schizophrenia have showed impaired autonomic function. We also plan to study neurophysiological correlates of these behaviors with evoked response potentials (EP) and eventually functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) We expect EPs to show significant change in relation to development of the behavioral response. The association of awareness of the stimulus contingency with slow cortical potentials on the EEG will also be of interest.