Translational studies to specify attentional deficits in schizophrenia: amplificatory and inhibitory mechanisms in multisensory information selection

注意是一个描述信息选择的神经认知过程的心理结构。因此，在相关信息和无关信息在认知加工中争夺优先权的情况下，注意力变得特别重要。因此，在子程序水平上，增加任务相关加工的放大机制和减少任务无关信息加工的抑制机制可以区分开来。在提出者先前工作的基础上，本研究项目旨在通过最先进的神经成像技术对注意的放大和抑制亚过程进行系统的研究。计划中的研究包括，首先，对健康人脑中注意力次级过程的神经实现进行一系列基础认知神经科学研究。其次，转化性临床研究应该根据精神分裂症患者中公认的选择性注意缺陷的特定病理生理学相关性，确定精神分裂症患者这些注意亚过程的潜在障碍。因此，拟议的研究将为了解健康大脑中信息处理的神经机制以及精神分裂症注意缺陷的病理生理学提供重要的新见解。

Attention is a psychological construct to describe neurocognitive processes of information selection. Accordingly, attention becomes especially important in situations in which relevant and irrelevant information compete for priority in cognitive processing. Thereby, at the sub-procedural level, amplificatory mechanisms to increase task-relevant processing can be distinguished from inhibitory mechanisms that decrease the processing of task-irrelevant information. Building upon prior work of the proposers, the present study project aims at a systematic investigation of amplificatory and inhibitory attentional sub-processes by state-of-theart neuroimaging techniques. The planned investigations comprise, first, a series of basic cognitive neuroscientific studies on the neural implementation of attentional sub-processes in the healthy human brain. Second, translational clinical investigations should define potential disturbances of these attentional subprocesses in schizophrenia patients, in terms of specific pathophysiological correlates of the well established selective attentional deficits in this disorder. Hence, the proposed investigations will provide important new insights in the neural mechanisms of information processing in the healthy brain as well as in the pathophysiology of attentional deficits in schizophrenia.