The proposed study will examine electrophysiological correlates of disrupted spatial working memory in schizophrenia, patients and their genetically vulnerable relatives, in an attempt to characterize the nature and extent of this neurocognitive deficit, as well as its heritability. Specifically delineated is a data analysis protocol intended to describe neurocognitive aspects of working memory, including the extent of integration of distributed cortical activity, as well as the absolute magnitude of this activation. Although patients and their relatives show degraded working memory performance in addition to disrupted functional connectivity among the nodes of a putative cortical working memory circuit, critical points of ambiguity remain: e.g., when patients show degraded working memory performance, are their brains relatively less active than controls' brains, or relatively more active and less efficient? The present analyses address this issue, among others. Also proposed is the development of a cognitive task designed to assess the nature and extent of the overlap between spatial working memory and goal-directed visual attention, two constructs shown to be impaired in schizophrenia patients and their relatives. Further, both working memory and attention are believed to have relevance to the information processing difficulties shown to predict functional outcome in patients and indicate vulnerability in their relatives; however, their relationship must be studied directly in order to parse respective contributions to variance in functioning.
| Bachman, Peter; Kim, Junghoon; Yee, Cindy M et al. (2009) Efficiency of working memory encoding in twins discordant for schizophrenia. Psychiatry Res 174:97-104 |
| Bachman, Peter; Kim, Junghoon; Yee, Cindy M et al. (2008) Abnormally high EEG alpha synchrony during working memory maintenance in twins discordant for schizophrenia. Schizophr Res 103:293-7 |
