About this Research Topic

Background

Impairments in early sensory information processing have been consistently identified in patients with schizophrenia as well as in individuals at high clinical risk for developing psychosis.
There is increasing evidence that the deficits at these early levels of information processing significantly contribute to the widespread impairments in cognitive and psychosocial functioning in schizophrenia and related neuropsychiatric disorders.

Behavioral and neurophysiological measures of early information processing in schizophrenia correlate with cognition and functional outcome, can be reliably measured across diverse settings, and are commonly used as both endophenotypes in genomic studies and as biomarkers in clinical outcome studies. Many of these behavioral and neurophysiologic measures are sensitive to procognitive therapies with evidence that such sensitivity might predict improvements in more distant treatment outcomes.

This Research Topic welcomes relevant original research articles based on clinical or experimental approaches, reviews, mini reviews, case reports, data reports, general commentaries, brief research reports and opinion articles. This collection will include, but is not limited to the following topics in schizophrenia or related neuropsychiatric disorders:

1) Experimental medicine or treatment trials using behavioral, neurophysiologic, or neuroimaging measures of early information processing as biomarkers, endpoints, or clinical correlates.

2) Intervention studies that specifically target amelioration of impairments in low-level processes.

3) Characterization of relationships among measures of early information processing with clinical, cognitive, and psychosocial functioning.

4) Delineation of the neural and/or genomic substrates of early information processing abnormalities using human or infrahuman species.

5) Novel statistical or computational neuroscience approaches applied to conventional measures of early information processing.

6) Development of novel behavioral or neurophysiologic methods for the assessment of early information processing.

7) Pharmacologic or nonpharmacologic studies that disrupt and/or enhance measures of early auditory information processing.

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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