Differential frontal activation in schizophrenia and bipolar illness during verbal fluency

Weakness of will, akrasia, and the neuropsychiatry of decision making: An interdisciplinary perspective

“…Moreover, performance on experimental tasks designed to measure responses to such types of real-world problems shows similar impairments, which are strongly associated with negative symptoms and executive functioning in patients with schizophrenia (Semkovska, Stip, Godbout, Paquet, & Bédard, 2002). Impairment on verbal and other fluency tasks has also been consistently reported and is associated with hypoactivation of left dorsolateral and frontopolar prefrontal cortex (Curtis et al, 2001;Takizawa et al, 2008). Traditionally, creativity has been thought to be increased in patients with schizophrenia (Andreasen, 1987), but recent evidence has found an opposite pattern of decreased creativity in patients with negative symptom schizophrenia (Abraham, Windmann, McKenna, & Güntürkün, 2007), which is in line with the analysis we propose here.…”

The Effects of CACNA1C Gene Polymorphism on Spatial Working Memory in Both Healthy Controls and Patients with Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder

“…It should be noted that these studies used different techniques and measures. For example, some used the fMRI technique to measure prefrontal activity related to working memory (Curtis et al, 2001;Costafreda et al, 2011;McIntosh et al, 2008), others used the structural MRI technique to measure the gray matter volumes of the prefrontal cortex (Molina et al, 2011), and still others used the magnetic resonance spectroscopy technique to measure the NAA concentration (Molina et al, 2007) in the prefrontal cortex.…”

Neural correlates of executive function and working memory in the ‘at risk mental state’

“…These differences were evident in brain regions that are normally activated during these paradigms in volunteers: the prefrontal and parietal cortex during the N-Back task, and the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex during verbal fluency. [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] The differential activation was not attributable to impairments in task performance, as there were no significant differences in the speed or accuracy of responses across groups, and the analysis selectively modelled the BOLD response to those trials associated with correct responses. The lack of difference in behavioural performance allows the interpretation of activations to proceed knowing that the psychological task is being carried to an equal level by all participants and hence, any remaining difference in activation is likely to be due to the disorder of interest, rather than a non-specific correlate of poor performance.…”