Next to my main topic, memory processing, I am also involved in the PhD project of Claudia Simons, who works at the department of Social Psychiatry (School for Mental Health and Neuroscience). Together with prof. dr. Jim van Os, dr. Lydia Krabbendam, and prof. dr. Wim Riedel, she examines schizophrenic patients, as well as their healthy brothers/sisters and healthy controls. In an EEG study, we search for the best assessment tool to determine whether somebody is vulnerable to develop psychosis.
My role in this project is to supervise Claudia Simons during the EEG recordings and analyses. Furthermore, I am in charge of one of the tasks that are performed in this EEG project: the mismatch negativity (MMN) task. In this task, frequent standard stimuli are interspersed with infrequent deviant stimuli.
This is an example of a brain response to a frequent standard (solid) and infrequent deviant (dotted) tone. The shaded area shows the actual MMN response. By the way, this is an MMN recorded from my own head!
The MMN is a negative potential in the ERP that occurs between 100 and 200 ms after the onset of a stimulus. It can be elicited to any discriminable change in stimulation and no attention is needed to elicit the MMN. We distract the participants from listening to the tones by showing them a silent video while the stimuli are presented. In this experiment, we evaluate whether the MMN response is similar in schizophrenic patients and their healthy brothers and/or sisters, or whether the MMN response of the brothers/sisters looks like the control MMN.
All participants have been tested now and we are in the middle of the analysis. I hope to be able to show some results here soon.
