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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Cerebellar and cortico-striatal-midbrain contributions to reward-cognition processes and apathy within the psychosis continuum
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Indrit Bègue
  • Janis Brakowski
  • Erich Seifritz
  • Alain Dagher
  • Philippe Tobler
  • Matthias Kirschner
  • Stefan Kaiser
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Schizophrenia Research
Publisher Elsevier
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0920-9964
Volume 246
Page Range 85 - 94
Date 2022
Abstract Text Negative symptoms in the psychosis continuum are linked to impairments in reward processing and cognitive function. Processes at the interface of reward processing and cognition and their relation to negative symptoms remain little studied, despite evidence suggestive of integration in mechanisms and neural circuitry. Here, we investigated brain activation during reward-dependent modulation of working memory (WM) and their relationship to negative symptoms in subclinical and early stages of the psychosis continuum. We included 27 persons with high schizotypal personality traits and 23 patients with first episode psychosis as well as 27 healthy controls. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing an established 2-back WM task with two reward levels (5 CHF vs. no reward), which allowed us to assess common reward-cognition regions through whole-brain conjunction analyses and to investigate relations with clinical scores of negative symptoms. As expected for behavior, reward facilitated performance while cognitive load diminished it. At the neural level, the conjunction of high reward and high cognitive load contrasts across the psychosis continuum showed increased hemodynamic activity in the thalamus and the cerebellar vermis. During high cognitive load, more severe apathy but not diminished expression in the psychosis continuum was associated with reduced activity in right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, midbrain, posterior vermal cerebellum, caudate and lateral parietal cortex. Our results suggest that hypoactivity in the cerebellar vermis and the cortical-striatal-midbrain-circuitry in the psychosis continuum relates to apathy possibly via impaired flexible cognitive resource allocation for effective goal pursuit.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1016/j.schres.2022.06.010
Other Identification Number merlin-id:22612
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Keywords Biological psychiatry, psychiatry and mental health, psychosis spectrum, functional neuroimaging, apathy, cerebellum