Multi-functional MRI studies of disordered brain circuits in schizophrenic and affective psychoses

In the past years, advanced experimental paradigms have been developed which allow to perform targeted investigations of brain circuits subserving cognitive, motivational and executive processes in humans. In the functional neuroimaging studies presented here, we applied a battery of recently established experimental paradigms in order to systematically investigate different core pathophysiological processes and neurocognitive and neurophysiological endophenotypes of schizophrenic and affective psychoses. These paradigms included different versions of circuit-specific working memory tasks (Gruber 2001, Gruber & von Cramon 2001, 2003), a combined task-switching, oddball and incongruency paradigm (Gruber et al. 2009, 2010), and the “desire-reason dilemma” paradigm (Diekhof & Gruber 2010), which assesses functional interactions between the reward system and prefrontal control mechanisms. The functional integrity of all of these neural mechanisms was investigated in groups of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder and unipolar depression. In short, we found both common and disease-specific neuropathophysiological abnormalities particularly in frontal and parietal cortical areas and in the basal ganglia (ventral striatum, reticular thalamic nucleus, locus coeruleus and ventral tegmental area). A full overview of the findings will be given at the conference.