Electrophysiological Changes in P200 Latency and Amplitude of Jittered Orientation Visual Integration Task in Healthy Participants: a Multi-Block Design EEG Study

Visual integration, the ability to fuse environmental information such as light, color, shades, and motion to form a representation of a whole cohesive higher-order visual image, is impaired in persons with schizophrenia. Little is known how the P200 component, an event-related potential (ERP) in the parieto-occipital region, is affected in persons with schizophrenia while they perform visual integration tasks, when compared to healthy persons. This study administered Gabor contours that varied in high and low degrees of orientational jitter through the Jitter Orientation Visual Integration (JOVI) task to investigate visual integration by analyzing latency and amplitude of the P200 component. Data was acquired via EEG from seventeen healthy participants. The purpose of this study was to assess difficulty of jitter on the latency and amplitude of P200, and the electrophysiological effect from practice when comparing the last block data with the first block data. The mean amplitude of the hard difficulty jitters (11, 13, and 15 degrees) was found to be significantly larger than that of the easy difficulty jitters (0, 7, and 9 degrees). A trend in the latency of P200 between hard difficulty and easy difficulty was found. No interaction between blocks and latency and amplitude was found. Data from this study will be further used and analyzed when EEG data is acquired from patients with schizophrenia in the upcoming years