Investigating Graphesthesia Task Performance in the Biological Relatives of Schizophrenia Patients

This study compared the performance of 39 biological relatives of persons with schizophrenia to that of 30 normal adult controls on graphesthesia processing, a complex somatosensory processing task. The relatives performed significantly worse on the graphesthesia task compared to the healthy controls. The relatives and control subjects, however, did not differ on two neurocognitive control tasks. These data are interpreted within the context of a somatosensory deficit linked to schizophrenia liability.