Failure of Schizophrenia Patients to Overcome Salient Distractors During Working Memory Encoding

Hahn, Britta; Robinson, Benjamin M.; Kaiser, Samuel T.; Harvey, Alexander N.; Beck, Valerie; Leonard, Carly J.; Kappenman, Emily S.; Luck, Steven J.; Gold, James M.

doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.04.014

Cited by 82 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…In contrast, patients were significantly less effective when the task was more demanding. Indeed, attentional control plays an important role in the inhibition of irrelevant information (Forster and Lavie, 2008), with our results suggesting a deficit in these processes in psychotic disorders, which is consistent with previous studies (e.g., Fuller et al 2006;Hahn et al, 2010;Mitchell and Rossell, 2014). Also consistent with this, are our findings that psychotic patients had significantly higher state-anxiety levels prior to the attentional task, compared to healthy individuals.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

RETRACTED: The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders

Grave

Soares

Morais

et al. 2017

Psychiatry Research

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A B S T R A C TPsychotic disorders are some of the most severe psychiatric conditions. Patients have difficulties in identifying facial expressions and appear to be highly sensitive to the presence of emotional distractors. Yet, no study has investigated whether perceptual load modulates the interference of emotional distractors. Our goal was to test whether psychotic patients were more sensitive to irrelevant emotional stimulus, even when the task demands a high amount of attentional resources. Twenty-two participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and twenty-two healthy controls, performed a target letter discrimination task with emotional task-irrelevant stimulus (angry, happy and neutral facial expressions). Target-letters were presented among distrator-letters, which could be similar (low perceptual load) or different (high load); participants should discriminate the target-letter and ignore the facial expression. Results showed that patients were more prone to distraction by task-irrelevant stimulus, especially under high load, suggesting difficulties in attention control. Moreover, in psychotic patients, happy faces caused higher interference with the task, whereas neutral and angry faces resulted in less interference. These findings could provide innovative approaches regarding attentional deficits on social contexts in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

RETRACTED: The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders

Grave

Soares

Morais

et al. 2017

Psychiatry Research

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“…SCZ has been repeatedly associated with increased susceptibility to distraction (Anticevic et al, 2011; Anticevic et al, 2012b; Hahn et al, 2010; Oltmanns and Neale, 1975), especially during WM performance (Hahn et al, 2010), which may be associated with deficits in PFC function (Anticevic et al, 2011). However, microcircuit hypotheses of such distractibility during WM remain unexplored.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schizophrenia is associated with a pattern of spatial working memory deficits consistent with cortical disinhibition

Starc

Murray

Santamauro

et al. 2017

Schizophrenia Research

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Schizophrenia is associated with severe cognitive deficits, including impaired working memory (WM). A neural mechanism that may contribute to WM impairment is the disruption in excitation-inhibition (E/I) balance in cortical microcircuits. It remains unknown, however, how these alterations map onto quantifiable behavioral deficits in patients. Based on predictions from a validated microcircuit model of spatial WM, we hypothesized two key behavioral consequences: i) increased variability of WM traces over time, reducing performance precision; and ii) decreased ability to filter out distractors that overlap with WM representations. To test model predictions, we studied N = 27 schizophrenia patients and N = 28 matched healthy comparison subjects (HCS) who performed a spatial WM task designed to test the computational model. Specifically, we manipulated delay duration and distractor distance presented during the delay. Subjects used a high-sensitivity joystick to indicate the remembered location, yielding a continuous response measure. Results largely followed model predictions, whereby patients exhibited increased variance and less WM precision as the delay period increased relative to HCS. Schizophrenia patients also exhibited increased WM distractibility, with reports biased toward distractors at specific spatial locations, as predicted by the model. Finally, the magnitude of the WM drift and distractibility were significantly correlated, indicating a possibly shared underlying mechanism. Effects are consistent with elevated E/I ratio in schizophrenia, establishing a framework for translating neural circuit computational model of cognition to human experiments, explicitly testing mechanistic behavioral hypotheses of cellular-level neural deficits in patients.

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“…Prefrontal dysfunction is thought to be a major constituent of altered cognitive control in schizophrenia (Minzenberg et al 2009), with crucial functions in higher-level gating and top-down processing (Miller, 2000). Thus, the joint finding of fronto-occipital cortical folding alterations provides indirect support for an integrative model of both higher-order and early sensory processing deficits in the cortex of schizophrenia patients (Silbersweig & Stern, 1996;Adcock et al 2009;Hugdhal, 2009;Hahn et al 2010;Neuhaus et al 2011;Waters et al 2012). Moreover, our findings might reflect a potential pathomechanism for an additive disruption of top-down and bottom-up cortical processing associated with schizophrenia.…”

Section: Effect Of Ncan Variation On Occipital and Frontal Cortical Fmentioning

confidence: 95%

Common variation inNCAN, a risk factor for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, influences local cortical folding in schizophrenia

et al. 2013

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This study is the first to describe an effect of the NCAN risk variant on brain structure. Our data show that the NCAN risk allele influences cortical folding in the occipital and prefrontal cortex, which may establish disease susceptibility during neurodevelopment. The findings suggest that NCAN is involved in visual processing and top-down cognitive functioning. Both major cognitive processes are known to be disturbed in schizophrenia. Moreover, our study reveals new evidence for a specific genetic influence on local cortical folding in schizophrenia.

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Failure of Schizophrenia Patients to Overcome Salient Distractors During Working Memory Encoding

Cited by 82 publications

References 49 publications

RETRACTED: The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders

RETRACTED: The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders

Schizophrenia is associated with a pattern of spatial working memory deficits consistent with cortical disinhibition

Common variation inNCAN, a risk factor for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, influences local cortical folding in schizophrenia

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