Sensory gating is related to positive and disorganised schizotypy in contrast to smooth pursuit eye movements and latent inhibition
Section snippets
Sensory gating
Sensory gating is a neurophysiological measure of attention and information processing observed during electroencephalographic (EEG) recording (Cadenhead et al., 2000). Sensory gating is characterised by attenuation of the event-related potential (ERP) P50 by 9–73% upon repetition of an identical auditory stimulus in healthy controls (Cadenhead et al., 2000; Croft et al., 2001; Park et al., 2015; Wan et al., 2007). Sensory gating relates to the attenuation of redundant sensory information for
Participants
An opportunity sample of 205 participants (130 female, 69 male, and 6 undisclosed, mean age = 24.04 years, SD = 7.88 years, range = 18–68 years; 158 were studying for an undergraduate or master's degree, 6 were studying for PhDs, the remainder did not have degrees) were recruited from Bournemouth from those who responded to an advert. We did not analyse the results by educational level as previous work has indicated no relationship between age, nor educational level and sensory gating (Lijffijt
Results
The mean score on the SPQ was 32.22 (SD = 21.81, see Table 1). This was comparable to other published studies using this questionnaire, though on the high side: M = 26.9, SD = 11.0 (Raine, 1991); M = 27.34, SD = 12.41 (Smyrnis et al., 2007a, Smyrnis et al., 2007b); M = 30.00, SD = 9.68 (Wuthrich and Bates, 2006). We ran two separate analysis protocols. Firstly, we ran correlations summarised in Table 2: We used a hierarchical approach to this analysis, first correlating each neurophysiological
Discussion
We attempted to explore four endophenotypes of schizotypy, latent inhibition, and how they relate to different clusters of symptoms. We explored sensory gating, thought to represent pre-conscious attention and information processing (Cadenhead et al., 2000), smooth pursuit eye movements, thought to measure visual motion processing, attention, working memory, and oculomotor inhibition (the ability to inhibit eye movements, Siever and Davis, 2004), prepulse inhibition, thought to measure the
Credit author statement
Peter J Hills – Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Resources, Writing, Supervision, Project administration; Martin R Vasilev – Formal analysis, Software, Writing – review & editing; Panarai Ford – Investigation, Writing – original draft; Lucy Snell – Investigation, Writing – original draft; Emma Whitworth – Conceptualisation, Investigation, Writing – original draft; Tessa Parsons – Investigation, Writing – original draft; Rebecca Morisson – Investigation, Writing –
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Matt Green for technical assistance in the set-up of the eye-trackers and EEG equipment. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. This work was conducted between 2015 and 2016 and between 2019 and 2020.
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