Psychiatry Research 126 (2004) 241–252 0165-1781/04/$ - see front matter  2004 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2004.02.011 Maintaining and updating semantic context in schizophrenia: an investigation of the effects of multiple remote primes Helen J. Chenery *, David A. Copland , John McGrath , Greg Savage a, a,b c d,e Center for Research in Language Processing and Linguistics, Division of Speech Pathology, a School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia Department of Speech Pathology, The Park, Centre for Mental Health, Wacol, Queensland 4076, Australia b Queensland Centre for Schizophrenia Research, The Park, Centre for Mental Health, Wacol, Queensland 4076, Australia c Department of Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia d Department of Psychology, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3810, Australia e Received 14 April 2003; received in revised form 7 February 2004; accepted 17 February 2004 Abstract Conflicting findings regarding the ability of people with schizophrenia to maintain and update semantic contexts have been due, arguably, to vagaries within the experimental design employed (e.g. whether strongly or remotely associated prime-target pairs have been used, what delay between the prime and the target was employed, and what proportion of related prime-target pairs appeared) or to characteristics of the participant cohort (e.g. medication status, chronicity of illness). The aim of the present study was to examine how people with schizophrenia maintain and update contextual information over an extended temporal window by using multiple primes that were either remotely associated or unrelated to the target. Fourteen participants with schizophrenia and 12 healthy matched controls were compared across two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs)(short and long) and two relatedness proportions (RP)(high and low) in a crossed design. Analysis of variance statistics revealed significant two- and three-way interactions between Group and SOA, Group and Condition, SOA and RP, and Group, SOA and RP. The participants with schizophrenia showed evidence of enhanced remote priming at the short SOA and low RP, combined with a reduction in the time course over which context could be maintained. There was some sensitivity to biasing contextual information at the short SOA, although the mechanism over which context served to update information appeared to be different from that in the controls. The participants with schizophrenia showed marked performance decrements at the long SOA (both low and high RP). Indices of remote priming at the short (but not the long) SOA correlated with both clinical ratings of thought disorder and with increasing length of illness. The results support and extend the hypothesis that schizophrenia is associated with concurrent increases in tonic dopamine activity and decreases in phasic dopamine activity.  2004 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Language; Semantic priming; Dopamine; Context *Corresponding author. Tel.: q61-7-3365-1069; fax: q61-7-3365-1877. E-mail address: h.chenery@uq.edu.au (H.J. Chenery).