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Reducing State Anxiety Using Working Memory Maintenance
Published on: July 19, 2017
Reduced parietofrontal effective connectivity during a working-memory task in people with high delusional ideation
Yu Fukuda1, Teresa Katthagen1, Lorenz Deserno1
1From the Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy CCM, Berlin, Germany (Fukuda, Katthagen, Kaminski, Heinz, Schlagenhauf); the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany (Deserno); Department of Neurology, Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany (Deserno, Kaminski, Schlagenhauf); the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY (Shayegan); and the Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, Germany (Kaminski).
Individuals with high delusional ideation show altered brain activity and connectivity during working memory tasks, even without behavioral deficits. These findings suggest a continuum of neural changes across psychosis spectrums.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Working-memory impairment is a key feature of schizophrenia and high-risk mental states.
- Previous research links psychosis stages to abnormal prefrontal activation and frontoparietal connectivity.
- It is unknown if similar neural alterations exist in individuals with subclinical psychosis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate working memory-related brain activity and connectivity in individuals with subclinical psychosis.
- To compare neural underpinnings of working memory between high and low delusional ideation groups.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an n-back working memory task.
- Comparison of 24 individuals with high delusional ideation and 24 with low delusional ideation.
- Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to assess frontoparietal effective connectivity.
Main Results:
- Individuals with high delusional ideation exhibited increased dorsolateral prefrontal activation.
- Reduced working memory-dependent parietofrontal effective connectivity was observed in the left hemisphere in the high ideation group.
- No significant behavioral differences were found between the groups.
Conclusions:
- Working memory network alterations are present in nonclinical individuals with psychotic experiences, even without cognitive deficits.
- Altered working memory connectivity may represent a continuous neural marker across the psychosis spectrum.
- Further research is needed to explore differences in specific working memory subprocesses.
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