Abstract
Cognitive impairment is common in patients with schizophrenia, and even those with relatively preserved function perform worse than healthy volunteers (HVs) on attentional tasks. This is consistent with the hypothesis that connectivity – in the frontoparietal network (FPN) activated during attention – is disrupted in schizophrenia. We examined attentional effects on connectivity in the FPN, in schizophrenia, using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Twenty-three HVs and 19 first-episode schizophrenia patients were scanned during a simple visual change test, known to activate the FPN, in which attention was monitored and directed with an orthogonal flicker-detection task. Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) of evoked responses was used to assess effective connectivity – and its modulation by changes in the attended stimulus dimension – in the following network: higher visual area; temporoparietal junction (TPJ); intraparietal sulcus (IPS); dorsal anterior cingulate cortex; and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. The final MEG analysis included 18 HVs and 14 schizophrenia patients. While all participants were able to maintain attention, HVs responded slightly, but non-significantly, more accurately than schizophrenia patients. HVs, but not schizophrenia patients, exhibited greater cortical responses to attended visual changes. Bayesian model comparison revealed that a DCM with attention dependent changes in both top-down and bottom-up connections best explained responses by patients with schizophrenia, while in HVs the best model required only bottom-up changes. Quantitative comparison of connectivity estimates revealed a significant group difference in changes in the right IPS-TPJ connection: schizophrenia patients showed relative reductions in connectivity during attended stimulus changes. Crucially, this reduction predicted lower intelligence. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that functional dysconnections in the FPN contribute to cognitive impairment in schizophrenia.
Highlights
Patients with schizophrenia exhibit reliable impairments on almost all cognitive tests [1]
Cognitive impairment is common in patients with schizophrenia, and even those with relatively preserved function perform worse than healthy volunteers (HVs) on attentional tasks. This is consistent with the hypothesis that connectivity – in the frontoparietal network (FPN) activated during attention – is disrupted in schizophrenia.We examined attentional effects on connectivity in the FPN, in schizophrenia, using magnetoencephalography (MEG)
Using Dynamic causal modeling (DCM), we found that patients with schizophrenia and HVs differ in their recruitment of the FPN during the processing of salient visual changes
Summary
Patients with schizophrenia exhibit reliable impairments on almost all cognitive tests [1]. Supporting the notion that cognitive impairment represents a core feature of the syndrome in addition to positive and negative symptoms, it has been reported in unaffected first degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. This suggests that the neural abnormalities underlying impaired cognition reflect the neurodevelopmental susceptibility to schizophrenia. Cognitive impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia that significantly impacts on the course of illness; warranting a more detailed understanding of its generalized nature and neurobiological basis
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