Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Deficits in Naturalistic Visual and Auditory Social Cognition in Individuals at Clinical High-Risk for Schizophrenia

社会认知缺陷是临床高危人群残疾和痛苦的主要来源 发展中的精神分裂症(CHR)。就像精神分裂症本身一样，这种状态与高社交比率有关 具有终生影响的功能性赤字。然而，人们对行为和神经功能知之甚少 在这一人群中，这些缺陷是相互关联的，而且几乎没有治疗方法。在这个项目中，我们将适应 我们开发的技术使用自然主义的刺激，包括电影剪辑和口头故事，以 测量社会认知的行为和神经相关性。到目前为止，我们在精神分裂症患者中发现了 用于视觉扫描社交场景的自然主义视频以寻找社交线索的眼球运动缺陷(如 情绪的面部表情)和对与整体有关的情绪的听觉表达的理解 社会认知缺陷。我们还发现了大量的功能性和静息态功能连接缺陷 在颞顶交界处/后上颞沟(TPJ-PSTS)中，作为 像视觉扫描这样的社会认知操作。这一地区也在成年早期完全成熟 大多数CHR的年龄，这表明这个年龄段的发育障碍可能会产生持久的影响。 我们将使用行为、功能和连接措施的组合来检查听觉和 CHRS患者与早期精神病患者的视觉社会认知的比较 人口学上匹配的健康对照组(HCS)。我们将测量对以下短视频片段的理解能力 社交情景、视觉扫描性能、听觉讽刺检测、由以下因素引起的TPJ-pSTS活动 包括纯视觉的电影剪辑和纯音频的有声故事，以及TPJ-PSTS休息状态功能 连通性。第一个目标是比较三个人群之间的这些衡量标准。第二个目标 将研究眼睛跟踪/视觉扫描和听觉讽刺是如何测量的(以及TPJ-PSTS 功能和连接性相关)在基线时和两年后再次预测社会认知。这个 第三个目标是在患有精神分裂症的慢性阻塞性肺病患者中重复这些措施，同时进行 HCS的子集。根据试验结果，我们假设视觉相关措施(视觉扫描，TPJ- PSTS电影观看活动、TPJ-PSTS连接)将受到轻微损害，但听觉措施 与HCS相比更高，导致基线时总体上相似的社会认知，而EPS将 在所有方面都受到了深刻的影响。此外，我们假设视觉扫描措施将 将CHR分为两组，一组类似于HCS，另一组类似于EP。后一组将是 大多数SZP转换器的来源，以及在重复测试中存在严重缺陷的那些。除了……之外 澄清这一人群中社会认知的相关性，这些实验的影响将是开放的 基于矫正视力的早期干预对该人群社会功能结果的新途径 TPJ-PSTS的扫描模式和神经调节。

Deficits in social cognition are a major source of disability and suffering in individuals at clinical high-risk for developing schizophrenia (CHR). Like schizophrenia itself, this state is associated with a high rate of social functioning deficits that have a life-long impact. However, little is known about the behavioral and neural correlates of these deficits in this population, and there are few if any treatments. In this project we will adapt techniques we developed that use naturalistic stimuli, including movie clips and spoken word stories, to measure behavioral and neural correlates of social cognition. In schizophrenia we have so far found profound deficits in the eye-movements used to visually scan naturalistic videos of social scenes for social cues (such as facial expressions of emotion) and comprehension of auditory expressions of emotion that relate to overall social cognition deficits. We have also found large functional and resting state functional connectivity deficits in the temporoparietal junction/posterior superior temporal sulcus (TPJ-pSTS), an area that serves as a hub for social cognitive operations like visual scanning. This region also fully matures in early adulthood around the age of most CHRs, suggesting that developmental failures at this age may have lasting effects. We will use a combination of behavioral, functional, and connectivity measures to examine auditory and visual social cognition in the CHRs in comparison to participants early in their psychotic illness (EPs) and demographically matched healthy controls (HCs). We will measure comprehension of short video clips of social situations, visual scanning performance, detection of auditory sarcasm, TPJ-pSTS activity evoked by both a visual only movie clip and an audio only spoken word story, and TPJ-pSTS resting state functional connectivity. The first aim will be to compare these measures between the three populations. The second aim will be to study how the eye-tracking/visual scanning and auditory sarcasm measures (and the TPJ-pSTS functional and connectivity correlates) predict social cognition at baseline and again in two years' time. The third aim will be to repeat these measures in the CHR individuals who develop schizophrenia, along with a subset of the HCs. Based on pilot results, we hypothesize that visual-related measures (visual scanning, TPJ- pSTS movie-watching activity, TPJ-pSTS connectivity) will be mildly impaired but auditory measures heightened compared to HCs, leading to overall similar social cognition at baseline, whereas in EPs will be profoundly affected in all measures. Furthermore, we hypothesize that visual scanning measures will segregate the CHRs into two groups, one similar to HCs and one similar to EPs. The latter group will be the source of most of the SzP converters, and the ones with profound deficits on repeat testing. In addition to clarifying the correlates of social cognition in this population, the impact of these experiments will be to open new avenues of early intervention on social functioning outcomes in this population based on correcting visual scanning patterns and neuromodulation of the TPJ-pSTS.