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Does chronic nicotine consumption influence visual backward masking in schizophrenia and schizotypy?

ABSTRACT: Nicotine consumption is higher for people within the schizophrenia spectrum compared to controls. This observation supports the self-medication hypothesis, that nicotine relieves symptoms in, for example, schizophrenia patients. We tested whether performance in an endophenotype of schizophrenia (visual backward masking, VBM) is modulated by nicotine consumption in i) smoking and non-smoking schizophrenia patients, their first-degree relatives, and age-matched controls, ii) non-smoking and smoking university students, and iii) non-smoking, early and late onset nicotine smokers. Overall, our results confirmed that VBM deficits are an endophenotype of schizophrenia, i.e., deficits were highest in patients, followed by their relatives, students scoring high in Cognitive Disorganisation, and controls. Moreover, we found i) beneficial effects of chronic nicotine consumption on VBM performance, in particular with increasing age, and ii) little impact of clinical status alone or in interaction with nicotine consumption on VBM performance. Given the younger age of undergraduate students (up to 30 years) versus controls and patients (up to 66 years), we propose that age-dependent VBM deficits emerge when schizotypy effects are targeted in populations of a larger age range, but that nicotine consumption might counteract these deficits (supporting the self-medication hypothesis).

SUBMITTER: Shaqiri A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5609643 | biostudies-other | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Does chronic nicotine consumption influence visual backward masking in schizophrenia and schizotypy?

Shaqiri Albulena A Willemin Julie J Sierro Guillaume G Roinishvili Maya M Iannantuoni Luisa L Rürup Linda L Chkonia Eka E Herzog Michael H MH Mohr Christine C

Schizophrenia research. Cognition 20150620 2

Nicotine consumption is higher for people within the schizophrenia spectrum compared to controls. This observation supports the self-medication hypothesis, that nicotine relieves symptoms in, for example, schizophrenia patients. We tested whether performance in an endophenotype of schizophrenia (visual backward masking, VBM) is modulated by nicotine consumption in i) smoking and non-smoking schizophrenia patients, their first-degree relatives, and age-matched controls, ii) non-smoking and smokin ...[more]

PMID: 29114459

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Project description:Prominent theories suggest that symptoms of schizophrenia stem from learning deficiencies resulting in distorted internal models of the world. To test these theories further, we used a visual statistical learning task known to induce rapid implicit learning of the stimulus statistics. In this task, participants are presented with a field of coherently moving dots and are asked to report the presented direction of the dots (estimation task), and whether they saw any dots or not (detection task). Two of the directions were more frequently presented than the others. In controls, the implicit acquisition of the stimuli statistics influences their perception in two ways: (i) motion directions are perceived as being more similar to the most frequently presented directions than they really are (estimation biases); and (ii) in the absence of stimuli, participants sometimes report perceiving the most frequently presented directions (a form of hallucinations). Such behaviour is consistent with probabilistic inference, i.e. combining learnt perceptual priors with sensory evidence. We investigated whether patients with chronic, stable, treated schizophrenia (n = 20) differ from controls (n = 23) in the acquisition of the perceptual priors and/or their influence on perception. We found that although patients were slower than controls, they showed comparable acquisition of perceptual priors, approximating the stimulus statistics. This suggests that patients have no statistical learning deficits in our task. This may reflect our patients' relative wellbeing on antipsychotic medication. Intriguingly, however, patients experienced significantly fewer (P = 0.016) hallucinations of the most frequently presented directions than controls when the stimulus was absent or when it was very weak (prior-based lapse estimations). This suggests that prior expectations had less influence on patients' perception than on controls when stimuli were absent or below perceptual threshold.

Dataset Information

Does chronic nicotine consumption influence visual backward masking in schizophrenia and schizotypy?

Publications

Does chronic nicotine consumption influence visual backward masking in schizophrenia and schizotypy?

Similar Datasets

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