Selective Attention Mechanisms in Schizophrenia

描述（由申请人提供）：注意力缺陷是精神分裂症患者特有的认知功能障碍和信息处理中的一般损伤的根本原因之一。当与正常成年人的表现相比，精神分裂症患者表现出显着的赤字的心理物理任务，需要分配和/或维护注意力的行为相关的信息。精神分裂症的注意力缺陷已经使用大量的任务和刺激参数进行了测量。这些研究中的许多集中在这样的发现上，即在精神分裂症患者中观察到的注意力的显著缺陷可能与视觉处理的解剖学和时间早期阶段的神经生理学视觉通路内的功能障碍有关。各种心理物理任务已被用于评估精神分裂症患者的大细胞和小细胞视觉通路的处理缺陷。因此，有人提出精神分裂症与优先大细胞/背流功能障碍有关。该项目将利用神经活动的电生理和功能神经影像学措施，以描绘精神分裂症患者的选择性视觉注意缺陷的神经解剖学和时间基础，特别是这些如何与大细胞和小细胞视觉通路内的感觉处理。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Attentional deficit is one of the root causes of the cognitive dysfunction and general impairments in information processing that are characteristic of persons afflicted with schizophrenia. When compared to the performance of normal adults, schizophrenia patients show pronounced deficits on psychophysical tasks requiring the allocation and/or maintenance of attention on behaviorally relevant information. Attention deficits in schizophrenia have been measured using a multitude of task and stimulus parameters. Many of these studies converge on the finding that the marked deficit in attention observed in schizophrenia patients may be related to a dysfunction within the neurophysiological visual pathways at an anatomically and temporally early stage of visual processing. Various psychophysical tasks have been used in order to evaluate processing deficits in the magnocellular and parvo-cellular visual pathways of schizophrenia patients. As a result, it has been proposed that schizophrenia is associated with preferential magnocellular/dorsal stream dysfunction. This project will utilize electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging measures of neural activity in order to delineate the neuroanatomical and temporal bases of selective visual attention deficits in schizophrenia patients and, in particular, how these relate to sensory processing within the magnocellular and parvo-cellular visual pathways.