Sensorimotor gating of the human startle reflex: Gender and laterality

Abstract

loway and Naghdi, 1982; Freedman et al., 1992; Braff et al., 1992). Semantic priming effects-one of the most widely studied phenomena in cognitive psychology--are experimental findings which relate to the simple discovery that subjects respond faster to a word (such as mouse) when it follows a related word (such as cat) than when it follows an unrelated word. The study of semantic priming effects provides a useful experimental tool for uncovering structural and processing characteristics of the semantic memory system, including basic information processing mechanisms such as spreading activation and attentional operations. We have studied a preliminary series of schizophrenic subjects who have undergone both a semantic priming experiment which examined mainly information processing (spread of activation in the semantic memory network) and an auditory-evoked potential measure of sensory gating, the PS0 conditioning-testing (C/T) ratio, which examines processing of auditory information. In our initial sample of subjects (n-7), we find a strong positive correlation between the PS0 C/T ratio and ~emantic priming effects obtained on the automatic semantic information processing task. Subjects who show greater-than-normal semantic priming effects ('hyperpriming) also show a failure to gate or inhibit their PS0 response to the testing stimulus. This finding may imply that a similar defect in inhibitory pathways underlies both impaired sensory gating and greater-than-normal information processing or spread of activation in the semantic memory network of some schizophrenic subjects.