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Published on: December 2, 2015
Altered error-related activity in patients with schizophrenia
Kathrin Koch1, Gerd Wagner, Christoph Schultz
1Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Philosophenweg 3, 07740 Jena, Germany. kathrin.koch@med.uni-jena.de
Neuropsychologia
|June 23, 2009
Summary
Schizophrenia patients show abnormal brain activity during working memory tasks, even when performance is matched with controls. These findings highlight widespread cortical inefficiency in schizophrenia, particularly in executive functions.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
- Neuroimaging
Background:
- Working memory (WM) and executive control deficits are central to schizophrenia.
- Previous research on brain activation in schizophrenia shows inconsistent findings, possibly due to task demands and performance variations.
- A cortical inefficiency model suggests a shifted inverted U-shaped relationship between performance and neuronal activation in patients.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate error-related working memory activity in schizophrenia using a novel performance-balancing approach.
- To resolve discrepancies in cognitive activation patterns by controlling for behavioral performance differences.
- To examine encoding, maintenance, and retrieval-related brain activation during a modified Sternberg Item Recognition task (SIRT).
Main Methods:
- Studied 55 patients with schizophrenia and 55 healthy controls.
- Employed a modified Sternberg Item Recognition task (SIRT) to differentiate encoding, maintenance, and retrieval phases.
- Balanced the number of incorrect responses between groups to analyze performance-matched error trials.
Main Results:
- Patients exhibited hypoactivation in temporal, parietal, frontal, and cerebellar regions during encoding of incorrectly remembered items compared to controls.
- During erroneous retrieval, patients showed reduced activation in the executive control network, including frontal areas, precuneus, and cerebellum.
- These activation abnormalities persisted even after balancing for performance, indicating underlying processing deficits.
Conclusions:
- Schizophrenia is associated with widespread activation abnormalities during both encoding and retrieval of erroneously processed information.
- These deficits are evident even when controlling for overall task performance, suggesting fundamental executive processing dysfunction.
- The findings support a model of cortical inefficiency in schizophrenia, particularly affecting executive functions.
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