Dysconnectivity of the inferior frontal gyrus: implications for an impaired self-other distinction in patients with schizophrenia.

Ego disturbances in schizophrenia might be caused by a failure of the efference copy mechanism, which compares efferent with reafferent signals and attenuates the sensory consequences of self-produced movements. We carried out a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in which 16 patients with schizophrenia and 16 healthy matched controls were studied while performing both intentional and unintentional continuous hand movements in two consecutive experiments. We periodically varied the delay of visual feedback to create a sensory-motor discrepancy.

Me, myself and I: temporal dysfunctions during self-evaluation in patients with schizophrenia.

Self-concept is deeply affected in schizophrenia. Positive symptoms in particular are related to disturbed self/other distinctions. The neural networks underlying self-evaluation in schizophrenia have barely been investigated.

Frequency and neural correlates of pauses in patients with formal thought disorder.

Background: Pauses during speech may reflect the planning and monitoring of discourse, two processes putatively impaired in patients with schizophrenia, particularly those with formal thought disorder (FTD). We used functional MRI to examine the neural correlates of between-clause and of filled pauses, which are respectively associated with speech planning and speech monitoring.

Methods: BOLD contrast was measured while six schizophrenia patients with FTD and six healthy subjects spoke about Rorshach inkblots.

Hyperintentionality during automatic perception of naturalistic cooperative behavior in patients with schizophrenia.

Social cognition and the corresponding functionality of involved brain networks are essential for effortless social interaction. Patients with schizophrenia exhibit impaired social functioning. In this study, we focused on the neural networks involved in the automatic perception of cooperative behavior and their alterations in schizophrenia.

Age-related changes in parietal lobe activation during an episodic memory retrieval task.

The crucial role of lateral parietal regions in episodic memory has been confirmed in previous studies. While aging has an influence on retrieval of episodic memory, it remains to be examined how the involvement of lateral parietal regions in episodic memory changes with age. We investigated episodic memory retrieval in two age groups, using faces as stimuli and retrieval success as a measure of episodic memory.

Cholinergic blockade under working memory demands encountered by increased rehearsal strategies: evidence from fMRI in healthy subjects.

The connection between cholinergic transmission and cognitive performance has been established in behavioural studies. The specific contribution of the muscarinic receptor system on cognitive performance and brain activation, however, has not been evaluated satisfyingly. To investigate the specific contribution of the muscarinic transmission on neural correlates of working memory, we examined the effects of scopolamine, an antagonist of the muscarinic receptors, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Supramodal representation of emotions.

Supramodal representation of emotion and its neural substrates have recently attracted attention as a marker of social cognition. However, the question whether perceptual integration of facial and vocal emotions takes place in primary sensory areas, multimodal cortices, or in affective structures remains unanswered yet. Using novel computer-generated stimuli, we combined emotional faces and voices in congruent and incongruent ways and assessed functional brain data (fMRI) during an emotional classification task.

Neuromagnetic oscillations and hemodynamic correlates of P50 suppression in schizophrenia.

Behavioral and electrophysiological data indicate compromised stimulus suppression in schizophrenia. The physiological basis of this effect and its contributions to the etiology of the disease are poorly understood. We examined neural and metabolic measures of P50 suppression in 12 patients with schizophrenia and controls.

Neural contributions to flow experience during video game playing.

Video games are an exciting part of new media. Although game play has been intensively studied, the underlying neurobiology is still poorly understood. Flow theory is a well-established model developed to describe subjective game experience.

The neural basis of disturbed efference copy mechanism in patients with schizophrenia.

Core psychopathological symptoms in patients with schizophrenia suggest that their sense of self may be disturbed. A disturbance in predictive motor mechanisms may be the cause of such symptoms. Ten patients with schizophrenia and ten healthy right-handed control subjects opened and closed their hand.

The interaction of working memory and emotion in persons clinically at risk for psychosis: an fMRI pilot study.

Subtle emotional and cognitive dysfunctions may already be apparent in individuals at risk for psychosis. However, there is a paucity of research on the neural correlates of the interaction of both domains. It remains unclear whether those correlates are already dysfunctional before a transition to psychosis.

The influence of multiple primes on bottom-up and top-down regulation during meaning retrieval: evidence for 2 distinct neural networks.

Meaning retrieval of a word can proceed fast and effortlessly or can be characterized by a controlled search for candidate lexical items and a subsequent selection process. In the current study, we facilitated meaning retrieval by increasing the number of words that were related to the final target word in a triplet (e.g.

Cerebral dysfunctions of emotion-cognition interactions in adolescent-onset schizophrenia.

Objective: Schizophrenia is among the most severe of psychiatric disorders, leading to impairments of affective and cognitive abilities. These dysfunctions affect each other mutually. Adolescent-onset schizophrenia (AOS) constitutes a particularly severe form of the disorder.

Neural correlates of verbal episodic memory in patients with MCI and Alzheimer's disease--a VBM study.

Objective: The hippocampus is a key area for episodic memory processes. Hippocampal atrophy is a hallmark feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD). We used a new and automatized morphometric technique to better characterize brain atrophy in subjects with different levels of cognitive deficit.

Self-face recognition in schizophrenia.

Objective: Altered self-awareness might be a core feature of schizophrenia. Facial self-recognition in children and non-human primates has been linked to the emergence of self-awareness. In this study, the ability to recognize the own face as an indicator of certain aspects of self-awareness was investigated in patients with schizophrenia.

Metacognition and reflexivity in patients with schizophrenia.

Background: Many patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a lack of insight into their disorder and often do not complain about their cognitive impairments. This might be due to generally reduced metacognitive abilities.

Sampling And Methods: Twenty-seven patients with a DSM IV diagnosis of schizophrenia and 19 healthy control subjects performed 2 separate tasks tapping into metacognitive functions.

Hippocampal activation in patients with mild cognitive impairment is necessary for successful memory encoding.

Background: Episodic memory enables us to consciously recollect personally experienced past events. Memory performance is reduced in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an at-risk condition for Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Patients And Methods: We used functional MRI (fMRI) to compare brain activity during memory encoding in 29 healthy elderly subjects (mean age 67.

A randomised trial of a geriatric evaluation and management consultation services in frail hospitalised patients.

Background: the usefulness of geriatric evaluation and management (GEM) approaches in the care of frail elderly patients remains uncertain. We examined whether an inpatient geriatric consultation service might be beneficial in a country with a social welfare system.

Methods: we conducted a randomised trial with 345 patients from five centres.

Neural correlates of metaphor processing in schizophrenia.

Objective: A main feature of schizophrenic thought and language disturbance is concretism, the inability to understand the figurative meaning of proverbs and metaphors. Although this is routinely tested during clinical interview, its neural basis is unknown.

Method: We investigated processing of metaphoric sentences with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 12 patients with schizophrenia and 12 control subjects.

Successful verbal retrieval in elderly subjects is related to concurrent hippocampal and posterior cingulate activation.

Objective: Memory decline and hippocampal atrophy are two major aspects of Alzheimer's disease. Using a response-related fMRI design, we investigated the relationship between successful verbal retrieval and concurrent cerebral activation in elderly subjects in different stages of cognitive decline. We chose a correlational over the more traditional categorical approach to increase the power of detecting relevant activations.

Visualization and quantification of disease progression in multiple system atrophy.

To visualize and quantify disease progression in multiple system atrophy (MSA) from cerebellar type (MSA-C), we combined two magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques, voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and 3D-based volumetry. Patients suffering from MSA-C (n = 14) were imaged twice with an interval of 2.0 +/- 0.

Laterality in metaphor processing: lack of evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging for the right hemisphere theory.

We investigated processing of metaphoric sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Seventeen healthy subjects (6 female, 11 male) read 60 novel short German sentence pairs with either metaphoric or literal meaning and performed two different tasks: judging the metaphoric content and judging whether the sentence has a positive or negative connotation. Laterality indices for 8 regions of interest were calculated: Inferior frontal gyrus (opercular part and triangular part), superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyrus, precuneus, temporal pole, and hippocampus.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and actual retrieval performance affect cerebral activation in the elderly.

Cerebral activation in the elderly may depend on general cognitive decline as well as actual retrieval performance. Consequently, activation between subjects with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and between remembered and non-remembered words was compared. Twenty-one MCI and 29 healthy control subjects learned 180 nouns.

Cortical activation during cholinesterase-inhibitor treatment in Alzheimer disease: preliminary findings from a pharmaco-fMRI study.

Objective: Cholinesterase inhibitors improve cognitive functioning in Alzheimer disease (AD). The authors studied, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the neural mechanism by which this cholinergic enhancement improves memory encoding in AD over longer time periods.

Methods: Brain activation was measured in 10 patients with AD and 10 healthy elderly comparison subjects with fMRI while they were encoding novel faces.