Selective Attention Mechanisms in Schizophrenia

描述(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一般信息处理障碍的根本原因之一。与正常成年人的表现相比，精神分裂症患者在需要分配和/或保持对行为相关信息的注意的心理物理任务上表现出明显的缺陷。精神分裂症的注意力缺陷是使用多种任务和刺激参数来衡量的。许多这些研究都集中在这样一个发现上，即在精神分裂症患者中观察到的明显的注意力缺陷可能与在解剖学和时间上的视觉加工的早期阶段的神经生理视觉通路内的功能障碍有关。为了评估精神分裂症患者的大细胞和小细胞视觉通路的加工缺陷，已经使用了各种心理物理任务。因此，有人提出精神分裂症与偏爱的大细胞/背流功能障碍有关。这个项目将利用神经活动的电生理和功能神经成像手段来描绘精神分裂症患者选择性视觉注意缺陷的神经解剖学和时间基础，特别是这些基础如何与大细胞和微小细胞视觉通路中的感觉处理有关。

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.