Atypical spatial frequency dependence of visual metacognition among schizophrenia patients

Abstract

Although a potential link between altered metacognition and schizophrenia has been speculated, studies have yielded inconsistent results. This may be partly because such findings would depend on the stimulus properties. Here we tested the hypothesis that metacognitive performance may be atypically modulated by spatial-frequency of visual stimuli among individuals with schizophrenia, given their altered magnocellular function. In Experiment 1, we used the signal detection theoretic measure meta-d' to quantify metacognitive performance of healthy participants in a visual detection task with confidence ratings. We then compared metacognitive performance between patients and controls with high and low spatial-frequency (HSF/LSF) stimuli outside and inside of an fMRI scanner (Experiment 2 and 3). Experiment 1 revealed that metacognitive performance is typically better after yes-(stimulus-presence) rather than after no-(stimulus-absence) responses. Experiment 2 revealed that control subjects showed such 'yes-response advantage' with HSF stimuli but not with LSF stimuli, while such spatial-frequency dependency was absent among the patients. Experiment 3 showed that the patients and controls differ in the functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and visual or parietal cortices as well as in the multivoxel decoding accuracy of perceptual confidence in DLPFC, in a spatial-frequency-dependent manner. While individuals without schizophrenia may flexibly adapt differential metacognitive computations across spatialfrequency range, patients may employ a different mechanism that is not dependent on spatialfrequency. Because visual stimuli of low spatial-frequency have been linked to top-down processing in predictive coding, this may reflect atypical functioning in these processes in schizophrenia.

Efficacy of neurofeedback training for improving attentional performance in healthy adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…NIRS is a convenient tool to measure brain activity as EEG, and several studies suggest that NFT with NIRS is useful for the rehabilitation after stroke (Mihara et al, 2021;Rahman et al, 2020). NFT with fMRI is also a promising tool to modulate brain activity (Koizumi et al, 2020). Future studies are required to determine which neuroimaging modality can best improve attentional performance.…”