Multivariate relationships between social cognitive performance and functional connectivity during task and rest...

Social cognitive deficits are common and impact functional outcomes in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs). Functional brain networks during task and rest show complex relationships with cognition. We aimed to identify relationships between social and non-social cognitive performance and functional connectivity during social processing and at rest across individuals with SSDs and healthy controls. Adults (N = 352; 195 SSDs, 157 controls) completed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during the Empathic Accuracy (EA) task and rest, and cognitive assessments. Partial least squares correlation was used to identify latent dimensions (LDs) capturing multivariate relationships between functional connectivity and cognitive measures, evaluated using permutation testing, bootstrapping, and cross-validation. Two significant EA LDs were identified, explaining 73.6 and 9.1% of the variance. EA LD1 captured an association between better performance across cognitive measures and positive connectivity across networks implicated in processing dynamic multimodal and social stimuli. EA LD2 reflected an association between worse EA task performance and stronger positive connectivity between networks implicated in language and social processing. One significant resting-state LD was identified, explaining 85.6% of the variance and capturing an association between better overall cognition and visual, somatomotor, and subcortical connectivity, driven more by the SSD group. Overlapping and divergent connectivity patterns appear to covary with cognitive performance during social processing versus rest across SSDs and healthy controls. Our results support the value of task-based fMRI to identify dimensional functional connectivity patterns associated with particular social cognitive abilities, whereas resting-state connectivity may reflect broader relationships with cognition.