Disease-specific contribution of pulvinar dysfunction to impaired emotion recognition in schizophrenia

Abstract

One important aspect for managing social interactions is the ability to rapidly and accurately perceive and respond to facial expressions, which is highly dependent upon intact processing within both cortical and subcortical components of the early visual pathways. Social cognitive deficits, including face emotion recognition (FER) deficits, are characteristic of several neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia (Sz) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Here, we investigated potential visual sensory contributions to FER deficits in Sz (n=28) and adult ASD (n=20) participants compared to neurotypical (n=30) controls using task-based fMRI during an implicit static/dynamic FER task. Compared to neurotypical controls, both Sz and ASD participants had significantly lower FER scores which interrelated with diminished activation of the superior temporal sulcus (STS). In Sz, STS deficits were predicted by reduced activation of both early visual regions and the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, along with impaired cortico-pulvinar interaction. By contrast, ASD participants showed patterns of increased early visual cortical and pulvinar activation. Large effect-size structural and histological abnormalities of pulvinar have previously been documented in Sz. Moreover, we have recently demonstrated impaired pulvinar activation to simple visual stimuli in Sz. Here, we provide the first demonstration of a disease-specific contribution of impaired pulvinar activation to social cognitive impairment in Sz.

Relay and higher-order thalamic nuclei show an intertwined functional association with cortical-networks

“…This finding suggests that the pulvinar nuclei possess a more prominent behavioral role than previously noted 87,88 . However, recent evidence [89][90][91] and connectivity of pulvinar with parietal and frontal areas 86 suggest the validity of our topic analysis.…”

The road not taken: disconnection of a human-unique cortical pathway in schizophrenia and its effects on naturalistic social cognition

“…SzP have long been noted to have a range of visual processing deficits (29)(30)(31)(32)(33) including in face-emotion recognition (34,35) and the processing of biological motion (36). These deficits have been linked to the lateral occipital cortex for visual processing (31,32) and the pSTS for face-emotion recognition (17). The functional connectivity deficits in this study likely reflect those deficits, and may represent disorganization or decreased/impaired use of this cortical region (37,38).…”