Impaired Midline Theta Power and Connectivity During Proactive Cognitive Control in Schizophrenia

Abstract

This study suggests that low-frequency midline theta activity is selectively disrupted during proactive cognitive control in SPs. The disrupted midline theta activity may reflect a failure of SPs to proactively recruit cognitive control processes.

Lateral Prefrontal Theta Oscillations Reflect Proactive Cognitive Control Impairment in Males With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

“…This deficit in inhibitory functioning has been related to delayed maturational processing, consistent with studies in healthy children that show that younger children have a poorer performance than older ones on this type of task (Yong-Liang et al, 2000;Durston et al, 2003;Spronk et al, 2008). Interestingly, recent reports have indicated that impaired proactive cognitive control is also present in other pathologies 1 https://neurosynth.org such as schizophrenia and depression in which these alterations crucially impact the quality of life of these patients (Billeke and Aboitiz, 2013;Billeke et al, 2013a;Solomon et al, 2014;Ryman et al, 2018).…”

“…This indicates that TD children, as opposed to children with ADHD, had significantly increased P3a amplitude with longer sequences of preceding Go trials. Since recent reports have shown modulations in a lower oscillatory activity such as delta and theta during the processing of contextual sequence information and proactive cognitive control during inhibition (Harper et al, 2016;Ryman et al, 2018), we tested for time-frequency modulations in our subjects. We calculated the single-trial wavelet transform (−0.5 to 1-s post-stimulus onset) for each subject and modeled the power of the signal using Nogo stimuli, number of preceding Go stimuli and if the preceding trial was an error as regressors (see ''Materials and Methods'' section for more details).…”

“…Proactive cognitive control is the ability to modify our responses anticipating the necessity of cognitive control based on the context provided by recent events (Hu and Li, 2012;Koechlin, 2014;Chang et al, 2017;Ryman et al, 2018), as opposed to reactive cognitive control, which requires the engagement of control processes at the onset of challenging task demands (Braver et al, 2009;Braver, 2012). Thus, proactive cognitive control requires the integration of past events and experience to adjust current goal-directed actions (Donoso et al, 2014), modifying and improving the cognitive control required for upcoming conflictive stimuli.…”

“…The expectation of a target stimulus during an ongoing sequence of stimuli generates an adaptation of cognitive resources related to proactive cognitive control. Such a process is generated by the sustained activity of the lateral PFC (Ryman et al, 2018), interacting with medial prefrontal regions (Cavanagh and Frank, 2014). Studies using electroencephalography (EEG) have demonstrated that stimulus sequence context modulates brain activity, increasing the P3 event-related potential (ERP) component and low-frequency theta and delta oscillations in a linear progression as the number of preceding non-targets increase (Polich and Bondurant, 1997;Zamorano et al, 2014;Harper et al, 2016) Early functional MRI (fMRI) studies indicate that the progression of the sequence is related to an increase in activity in both lateral PFC and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in adults, while children do not present a clear sequence effect (Durston et al, 2002a(Durston et al, ,b, 2003Kerns, 2006) although it must be kept in mind that the time resolution of the fMRI technique precludes a clear analysis of sequence effect (Zamorano et al, 2014).…”

Electrophysiology as a theoretical and methodological hub for the neural sciences

“…(a) Frontal midline theta power is enhanced during the need for control, whereas mediolateral theta phase synchrony is proposed to reflect the communication of this need to lateral frontal areas (Cavanagh & Frank, ). (b) Different psychiatric and neurological diseases characterized by frontal dysfunction have different patterns of theta band dynamics; 1 Cavanagh, Meyer, et al (); 2 Singh, Pirio Richardson, Narayanan, and Cavanagh (); 3 Ryman et al (). (c) Using features identified in the studies in (b), receiver operating characteristic (isosensitivity) plots can be created to determine the classification success against a control group.…”