Cortico-Striatal dysfunction during real-world comprehension in schizophrenia

This research was supported by the grants from the Massachusetts General Hospital Fund for Medical Discovery to T.S., from NIMH to G.K. & C.W. (K23 MH02034, MH071635-01, MH065356-03 ), from NARSAD and the Sidney Baer Trust to T. S. and G.K., and from NICHD to P.H. (HD25889), and by the Institute for Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery (MIND). Conclusion Our results suggest that in schizophrenia comprehension of the world is compromised by a disruption of the fine balance between taking advantage of the repetitiveness in our world, while still being able to comprehend novel information. This finding is consistent with previous results in the language domain1,5 and illustrates a potential pathogenic pathway to symptoms of this disorder. Fronto-temporal system: Processing of anomalous movie endings in patients with schizophrenia appeared not only to recruit the same inferior-frontal and temporal regions in the left hemisphere as in healthy controls, but also the right ventral temporal cortex. Furthermore, bilateral regions in the inferior frontal and temporal cortices appeared to be engaged less by the patients than healthy controls during processing of congruous movie endings, suggesting increased contextual priming in schizophrenia. Taken together, these findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia might excessively depend on the fronto-temporal associative semantic system during real-world comprehension.