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Neural and behavioral correlates of aberrant salience in individuals at risk for psychosis.

ABSTRACT: The "aberrant salience" model proposes that psychotic symptoms first emerge when chaotic brain dopamine transmission leads to the attribution of significance to stimuli that would normally be considered irrelevant. This is thought to occur during the prodromal phase of psychotic disorders, but this prediction has not been tested previously. In the present study, we tested this model in 18 healthy volunteers and 18 unmedicated individuals at ultra-high risk of psychosis. Subjects performed the Salience Attribution Test, which provides behavioral measures of adaptive and aberrant motivational salience, during functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess neural responses to relevant and irrelevant stimulus features. On a separate occasion, the same subjects were also studied with [(18)F]fluorodopa positron emission tomography to measure dopamine synthesis capacity. Individuals at ultra-high risk of psychosis were more likely to attribute motivational salience to irrelevant stimulus features (t(26.7) = 2.8, P = .008), and this bias was related to the severity of their delusion-like symptoms (r = .62, P = .008). Ventral striatal responses to irrelevant stimulus features were also correlated with delusion-like symptoms in the ultra-high risk group (r = .59, P = .017). Striatal dopamine synthesis capacity correlated negatively with hippocampal responses to irrelevant stimulus features in ultra-high risk individuals, but this relationship was positive in controls. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that aberrant salience processing underlies psychotic symptoms and involves functional alterations in the striatum, hippocampus, and the subcortical dopamine system.

SUBMITTER: Roiser JP

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3796080 | biostudies-other | 2013 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Neural and behavioral correlates of aberrant salience in individuals at risk for psychosis.

Roiser Jonathan P JP Howes Oliver D OD Chaddock Christopher A CA Joyce Eileen M EM McGuire Philip P

Schizophrenia bulletin 20121212 6

The "aberrant salience" model proposes that psychotic symptoms first emerge when chaotic brain dopamine transmission leads to the attribution of significance to stimuli that would normally be considered irrelevant. This is thought to occur during the prodromal phase of psychotic disorders, but this prediction has not been tested previously. In the present study, we tested this model in 18 healthy volunteers and 18 unmedicated individuals at ultra-high risk of psychosis. Subjects performed the Sa ...[more]

PMID: 23236077

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Project description:BackgroundA dysfunctional differentiation between self-relevant and irrelevant information may affect the perception of environmental stimuli as abnormally salient. The aberrant salience hypothesis assumes that positive symptoms arise from an attribution of salience to irrelevant stimuli accompanied by the feeling of self-relevance. Self-referential processing relies on the activation of cortical midline structures which was demonstrated to be impaired in psychosis. We investigated the neural correlates of self-referential processing, aberrant salience attribution, and the relationship between these 2 measures across the psychosis continuum.MethodsTwenty-nine schizophrenia patients, 24 healthy individuals with subclinical delusional ideation, and 50 healthy individuals participated in this study. Aberrant salience was assessed behaviorally in terms of reaction times to task irrelevant cues. Participants performed a self-reference task during fMRI in which they had to apply neutral trait words to them or to a public figure. The correlation between self-referential processing and aberrant salience attribution was tested.ResultsSchizophrenia patients displayed increased aberrant salience attribution compared with healthy controls and individuals with subclinical delusional ideation, while the latter exhibited intermediate aberrant salience scores. In the self-reference task, schizophrenia patients showed reduced activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), but individuals with subclinical delusional ideation did not differ from healthy controls. In schizophrenia patients, vmPFC activation correlated negatively with implicit aberrant salience attribution.ConclusionsHigher aberrant salience attribution in schizophrenia patients is related to reduced vmPFC activation during self-referential judgments suggesting that aberrant relevance coding is reflected in decreased neural self-referential processing as well as in aberrant salience attribution.

Dataset Information

Neural and behavioral correlates of aberrant salience in individuals at risk for psychosis.

Publications

Neural and behavioral correlates of aberrant salience in individuals at risk for psychosis.

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