Potentiation of Alpha Event-Related Desynchronization During a Visual Cortical Plasticity Task in Healthy Individuals and Patients With Schizophrenia

Long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of experience-dependent synaptic plasticity, has been demonstrated in humans by showing that repeated stimulation with a visual stimulus results in persistent enhancement of both EEG-based visual evoked potentials (VEPs) and event-related desynchronization (ERD) of the alpha rhythm. Impaired neuroplasticity, and LTP in particular, has been implicated in the core pathophysiology of schizophrenia (SZ). Using a visual high-frequency stimulation (VHFS) LTP-like plasticity paradigm, we previously showed that VHFS produced sustained potentiation of VEPs in healthy controls (HC), but not in SZ. Extending this prior work, we examined effects of VHFS on alpha-ERD in HC and SZ.