Interpersonal coordination in schizophrenia: a concise update on paradigms, computations, and neuroimaging findings.

Abstract

Abstract Social functioning impairment is a hallmark of mental illness. As one of the most intractable and severe psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia is characterized by deficits on multiple social cognitive domains. In particular, failures of interpersonal coordination (i.e., actions that occur in spatial and temporal concordance with those of other individuals in a social setting) in schizophrenia are closely linked to significant prognostic indicators, such as symptom remission, quality of life, and employment. Despite the increasing interest in the psychological and neural mechanisms of interpersonal coordination in schizophrenia, important gaps in our understanding remain. Notably, the study of the mechanisms underpinning interpersonal coordination is currently undergoing a methodological shift, moving its focus from single-person tasks to second- and multi-person paradigms, and from model-free to model-based analyses. However, applications of these advanced approaches in schizophrenia has been slow. Here, we provide a concise update on the uses of multi-person paradigms to study interpersonal coordination and mathematical models to dissect its computational mechanisms, at both behavioral and neural levels. We then review prior studies on large-scale neuroimaging studies that explore brain correlates of general social functions and further pointed to the implementation of dissecting interpersonal coordination deficits in schizophrenia. Finally, we highlight key challenges as well as exciting opportunities for integrating research in computational psychiatry with second- and multi-person approaches in investigating interpersonal coordination deficits in schizophrenia.