Highlights Compared visual ERPs in schizophrenia probands, bipolar probands, and relatives. Enhanced N1 in patients with schizophrenia predicted greater perceptual sensitivity. A schizophrenia specific N2 deficit may reflect impaired visual object recognition. Schizophrenia probands and relatives displayed reduced P3 varying by COMT genotype. Bipolar probands and relatives had milder abnormalities dependent on sex.

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The Sensory Gating Inventory (SGI) is a 36-item measure used to assess an individual’s subjective ability to modulate, filter, over-include, discriminate, attend to, and tolerate sensory stimuli. Due to its theoretical and empirical link with sensory processing deficits, this measure has been used extensively in studies of psychosis and other psychopathology. The current work fills a need within the field for a briefer measure of sensory gating aberrations that maintains the original measure’s utility. For this purpose, large samples (total n=1552) were recruited from two independent sites for item reduction/selection and brief measure validation, respectively. These samples reflected subgroups of individuals with a psychosis-spectrum disorder, at high risk for a psychosis-spectrum disorder, non-psychiatric controls, and non-psychosis psychiatric controls. Factor analyses and item-response models were used to create the SGI-Brief (10 Likert-rated items), a unidimensional self-report measure that retains the original SGI’s transdiagnostic (i.e., present across disorders) utility and content breadth. Findings show that the SGI-Brief has excellent psychometric properties (alpha=0.92) and demonstrates external validity through strong associations with measures of psychotic symptomatology, theoretically linked measures of personality (e.g., perceptual dysregulation), and modest associations with laboratory-based sensory processing tasks in the auditory and visual domains on par with the original version. Accordingly, the SGI-Brief will be a valuable tool for dimensional and transdiagnostic examination of sensory gating abnormalities within clinical science research, while reducing administrator and participant burden.