Aberrant Salience Is Related to Dysfunctional Self-Referential Processing in Psychosis

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Aberrant salience hypothesis suggests positive symptoms in psychosis stem from attributing self-relevance to irrelevant stimuli.
• Self-referential processing involves cortical midline structures, often impaired in psychosis.
• Investigating neural correlates of aberrant salience and self-referential processing across the psychosis spectrum.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine neural underpinnings of self-referential processing and aberrant salience attribution.
• To explore the relationship between these processes in schizophrenia patients and individuals with subclinical delusional ideation.
• To understand these mechanisms across the psychosis continuum.

Main Methods:

• fMRI study with 29 schizophrenia patients, 24 healthy individuals with subclinical delusional ideation, and 50 healthy controls.
• Behavioral assessment of aberrant salience using reaction times to irrelevant cues.
• Self-reference task involving applying neutral trait words to self versus a public figure.

Main Results:

• Schizophrenia patients showed significantly higher aberrant salience attribution than controls and subclinical groups.
• Reduced ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activation was observed in schizophrenia patients during self-reference tasks.
• vmPFC activation negatively correlated with aberrant salience attribution in schizophrenia patients.

Conclusions:

• Heightened aberrant salience attribution in schizophrenia is associated with diminished vmPFC activation during self-referential judgments.
• Aberrant relevance coding in schizophrenia reflects both reduced neural self-referential processing and increased aberrant salience.
• Findings suggest a neural link between aberrant salience and impaired self-referential processing in psychosis.