Aberrant Inter-Subject Correlations During Naturalistic Movie Watching in Schizophrenia
Poster No:
574
Submission Type:
Late-Breaking Abstract Submission
Authors:
Eric Reavis1, Yixuan (Lisa) Shen1, Ioana Ciuperca1, Lourdes Concepción Esparza1, Carolyn Parkinson1
Institutions:
1University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif., USA
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
Schizophrenia (SZ) is characterized by specific alterations in perception and cognition that have been studied extensively with traditional highly controlled, condition-poor experimental designs, typically with impoverished static stimuli. Few studies in SZ that have used more naturalistic paradigms, thus little is understood about how information processing might differ in SZ under conditions that more closely resemble the real world. Our study aims to address this knowledge gap using naturalistic movie stimuli and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in SZ and healthy control (HC) samples. One major goal of the study is to compare inter-subject correlations (ISCs) that index typicality of information processing between the two participant groups. In particular, we focused our primary analyses a priori on ISCs from regions of the default mode network (DMN), including the medial prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, temporoparietal junction, and posterior cingulate cortex due to the importance of these areas for processing of naturalistic audiovisual stimuli in healthy samples. ISCs in these regions for similar movie-watching paradigms have also been shown to relate to social functioning in healthy samples (e.g., Parkinson et al., 2018).
Methods:
An interim sample of 62 SZ (clinically stable outpatients) and 60 HC participants from this ongoing study completed a high-resolution T1 and three movie watching fMRI runs totaling about 40 minutes, among other measures. During fMRI, all participants viewed the same set of video clips in the same order. They were instructed to freely watch the videos as if they were watching television at home. We preprocessed the resulting data using fMRIprep (Esteban et al., 2019) and conducted manual checks to ensure data quality. Based on Schaefer et al. (2018) 200-region automated parcellations, we defined DMN ROIs at the individual subject level. We computed mean within-group ISCs for each participant within each ROI, quantifying the degree of similarity between the activity in each region for each individual relative to all other members of the group. We then compared mean ISCs between the SZ and HC groups for each ROI using independent-samples t-tests. We also conducted exploratory whole-brain and clip-wise ISC analyses.
Results:
In each DMN ROI, ISCs were reduced in SZ relative to HCs (all p < 0.001; see Figure 1). Whole-brain analyses showed a clear pattern in which both groups had the strongest ISCs were across lateral temporal areas (e.g., posterior superior temporal sulcus), but ISCs tended to be lower across the board in SZ compared to HCs (see Figure 2). Exploratory clip-wise analyses also suggested that group differences in ISCs might be more prominent for highly social videos compared to videos with minimal social content.
·Figure 1
·Figure 2
Conclusions:
These findings demonstrate that brain activity in key regions of the DMN and other cortical areas tends to be aberrant in SZ during a movie-watching paradigm intended to approximate real-world perceptual experience. Specifically, the current results suggest that information processing in SZ tends to be more idiosyncratic in SZ compared to HCs, which is consistent with past research using highly controlled stimuli. The present results extend these prior findings by showing that these effects extend to more naturalistic conditions. Furthermore, unlike previous approaches, the ISC method provides a quantitative index of the degree to which individuals' information processing differs from typical (in this case, the group average). Intriguingly, preliminary findings suggest that processing idiosyncrasy in the SZ group may be most prominent for highly social stimuli. As the sample size of this ongoing study grows, we plan to test whether this type of aberrant information processing relates to individual differences in social functioning in SZ, which is a major source of untreated disability in the condition.
Disorders of the Nervous System:
Psychiatric (eg. Depression, Anxiety, Schizophrenia) 1
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Neuroscience Other
Perception, Attention and Motor Behavior:
Perception: Multisensory and Crossmodal 2
Perception: Visual
Keywords:
Cognition
DISORDERS
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Perception
Psychiatric Disorders
Schizophrenia
Social Interactions
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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Provide references using APA citation style.
Parkinson, C., Kleinbaum, A. M., & Wheatley, T. (2018). Similar neural responses predict friendship. Nature communications, 9(1), 332.
Schaefer, A., Kong, R., Gordon, E. M., Laumann, T. O., Zuo, X. N., Holmes, A. J., ... & Yeo, B. T. (2018). Local-global parcellation of the human cerebral cortex from intrinsic functional connectivity MRI. Cerebral cortex, 28(9), 3095-3114.