Dr. Ford' s career to date incorporates applications of electrophysiological techniques to illuminate cognitive and experiential aspects of schizophrenia not readily amenable to behavioral assessments. Her career goals for the K02 Award include: * Enhancing skills in design of functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) studies; * Enhancing skills for analysis of event-related potential (ERP) data; * Exploring ways to integrate fMRI and ERP data; * Acquiring skills for simultaneous recording of fMRI and ERP; * Acquiring skills in magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording and analysis; * Improving skills in clinical assessment of psychotic symptoms. These skills will be applied to ongoing studies designed to test hypotheses about the contribution of corollary discharge deficits to the experience of hallucinations and response processing deficits in patients with schizophrenia. Specific work proposed includes: * Use ERPs in two separate experiments to directly compare two manifestations of failure of corollary discharge (N1 non-suppression and error-related negativity [ERN] non-suppression) in patients with schizophrenia, with and without hallucinations; * Directly compare these phenomena using fMRI in the same subjects; * Integrate ERP and fMRI data from these two experiments; * Add a clinical comparison group of psychotic depressed patients with and without hallucinations; * Perform a parallel study to explore the potential of magnetoencephalogram (MEG) for assessing the source of auditory N1m, an analog of the auditory N1. Stanford University provides a technologically and intellectually rich environment for extending Dr. Ford's research into new directions. The facilities and staff of the Department of Psychiatry, Lucas Imaging Center, as well as of the Bio-X program at Stanford will continue to be available to Dr. Ford. These will be supplemented by collaborations with investigators at University of California, San Francisco to conduct MEG studies, University of Pennsylvania to study multi-lead EEG processing, and Institute for Psychiatry, London to study phenomenology of hallucinations.
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