The main aim of the present study was to explore the value of several measures of handwriting in the study of motor abnormalities in patients with bipolar or psychotic disorders. 54 adult participants with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder or bipolar disorder and 44 matched healthy controls, participated in the study. Participants were asked to copy a handwriting pattern consisting of four loops, with an inking pen on a digitizing tablet. We collected a number of classical, non-linear and geometrical measures of handwriting. The handwriting of patients was characterized by a significant decrease in velocity and acceleration and an increase in the length, disfluency and pressure with respect to controls. Concerning non-linear measures, we found significant differences between patients and controls in the Sample Entropy of velocity and pressure, Lempel-Ziv of velocity and pressure, and Higuchi Fractal Dimension of pressure. Finally, Lacunarity, a measure of geometrical heterogeneity, was significantly greater in handwriting patterns from patients than from controls. We did not find differences in any handwriting measure on function of the specific diagnosis or the antipsychotic dose. Results indicate that participants with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder or bipolar disorder exhibit significant motor impairments and that these impairments can be readily quantified using measures of handwriting movements. Besides, they suggest that motor abnormalities are a core feature of several mental disorders and they seem to be unrelated to the pharmacological treatment.

Putative event-related potential correlates of perceptual and semantic bases of familiarity in recognition memory were examined with a categorized pictures recognition test. Our participants were presented, at study, with pictures of categorized objects and, at test, with either the very same pictures presented at study, different pictures of studied objects, pictures of new objects belonging to studied categories, or pictures of completely new-uncategorized objects. We found evidence for a parallel evaluation, within familiarity process, of both perceptual and semantic information. We also found new and interesting evidence for the existence of some common neural circuits involved in the FN400 effect, frontal component typically associated to familiarity, and the N400 effect, centro-parietal component typically elicited by 'semantically unexpected' linguistic stimuli.