The Visual Word Form Area compensates for auditory working memory dysfunction in schizophrenia

Auditory working memory impairments feature prominently in schizophrenia. However, the existence of altered and perhaps compensatory neural dynamics, sub-serving auditory working memory, remains largely unexplored. We compared the dynamics of induced high gamma power (iHGP) across cortex in humans d...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2020-06, Vol.10 (1), p.8881-8881, Article 8881
Main Authors: Herman, Alexander B, Brown, Ethan G, Dale, Corby L, Hinkley, Leighton B, Subramaniam, Karuna, Houde, John F, Fisher, Melissa, Vinogradov, Sophia, Nagarajan, Srikantan S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Auditory plasticity
Case-Control Studies
Female
Hallucinations
Hearing
Humans
Language
Magnetoencephalography
Male
Memory Disorders - diagnosis
Memory Disorders - physiopathology
Memory, Short-Term - physiology
Mental disorders
Middle Aged
Phonetics
Prefrontal Cortex - physiopathology
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia - physiopathology
Schizophrenic Psychology
Short term memory
Speech
Speech Perception
Superior temporal gyrus
Temporal cortex
Temporal gyrus
Temporal Lobe - physiopathology
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Auditory working memory impairments feature prominently in schizophrenia. However, the existence of altered and perhaps compensatory neural dynamics, sub-serving auditory working memory, remains largely unexplored. We compared the dynamics of induced high gamma power (iHGP) across cortex in humans during speech-sound working memory in individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and healthy comparison subjects (HC) using magnetoencephalography (MEG). SZ showed similar task performance to HC while utilizing different brain regions. During encoding of speech sounds, SZ lacked the correlation of iHGP with task performance in posterior superior temporal gyrus (STGp) that was observed in healthy subjects. Instead, SZ recruited the visual word form area (VWFA) during both stimulus encoding and response preparation. Importantly, VWFA activity during encoding correlated with the magnitude of SZ hallucinations, task performance and an independent measure of verbal working memory. These findings suggest that VWFA plasticity is harnessed to compensate for STGp dysfunction in schizophrenia patients with hallucinations.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-020-63962-0