Reduced intrinsic neural timescales in schizophrenia along posterior parietal and occipital areas

Abstract

We computed intrinsic neural timescales (INT) based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) data of healthy controls (HC) and patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SZ) from three independently collected samples. Five clusters showed decreased INT in SZ compared to HC in all three samples: right occipital fusiform gyrus (rOFG), left superior occipital gyrus (lSOG), right superior occipital gyrus (rSOG), left lateral occipital cortex (lLOC) and right postcentral gyrus (rPG). In other words, it appears that sensory information in visual and posterior parietal areas is stored for reduced lengths of time in SZ compared to HC. Finally, we found that symptom severity appears to modulate INT of these areas in SZ.

Intrinsic neural timescales in autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. A replication and direct comparison study

“…Further group-wise comparisons via Welch's one-tailed, twosample t-tests verified whether the group differences previously reported by Watanabe et al 24 and Uscătescu et al 25 , comparing each clinical group to TD could be replicated in our current sample. We also directly compared the two patient groups (these results are summarised in Table 3).…”

“…In the present study, we aimed to replicate previous findings regarding the INT patterns in autistic persons and those with SZ reported by Watanabe et al 24 and Uscătescu et al 25 , respectively. Both studies rely on the same computational approach to define the INT of resting-state fMRI time series.…”

“…Similar findings in a sample of autistic adolescents within the same study suggested that there is a developmental component to INT patterns. Similarly, in SZ, our group 25 found decreased INT in parietal and occipital areas compared to TD, which were also related to symptom severity. In addition, Wengler et al 26 showed that symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions are primarily related to alterations in somatosensory and auditory hierarchical INT gradients.…”

“…Of the ROIs based on Watanabe et al 24 , only the right middle insula (W_rMidIns) showed a significant main effect (F (2, 131) = 3.31, p = 0.04, ηp2 = 0.05), but not after false discovery rate (FDR) correction (p FDR = 0.1). Of the ROIs based on Uscătescu et al 25 , four out of five showed a significant main effect that also survived FDR correction (Table 2).…”

“…We considered 13 ROIs for the current project, eight based on Watanabe et al 24 and abbreviated with the prefix "W_", and five based on Uscătescu et al 25 , and abbreviated using the prefix "U_" (Table 4). The INT were calculated as described in Watanabe et al 24 , and based on the autocorrelation function of each voxel (please see the "Data analysis" section for more details).…”