Excessive left anterior hippocampal and caudate activation in schizophrenia underlie cognitive underperformance in a virtual navigation task

• Published in: Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging Vol. 341; p. 111826
• Main Authors: Zawadzki, John A., Girard, Todd A., Samsom, James, Foussias, George, Siddiqui, Ishraq, Lerch, Jason P., Grady, Cheryl, Wong, Albert H.C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.07.2024
• Subjects: Adult; Allocentric; Caudate; Caudate Nucleus - diagnostic imaging; Caudate Nucleus - physiopathology; Cognition; Fast thinking; Female; fMRI; Hippocampus; Hippocampus - diagnostic imaging; Hippocampus - physiopathology; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Middle Aged; Schizophrenia - diagnostic imaging; Schizophrenia - physiopathology; Spatial Navigation - physiology; Virtual Reality; fMRI; Caudate; Allocentric; Fast thinking; Cognition; Map; Hippocampus
• ISSN: 0925-4927; 1872-7506; 1872-7506
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2024.111826

•We used fMRI to probe brain activation during navigation through a virtual city.•Schizophrenia patients have altered brain activation in this task.•The hippocampus and caudate were the brain areas with altered activation.•Schizophrenia patients also have decreased navigation performance.•Schizophrenia patients are biased towards stimulus-response approaches. We used a virtual navigation paradigm in a city environment to assess neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). We studied a total of N = 36 subjects: 18 with SSD and 18 matched unaffected controls. Participants completed 10 rapid, single-trial navigation tasks within the virtual city while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). All trials tested ability to find different targets seen earlier, during the passive viewing of a path around different city blocks. SSD patients had difficulty finding previously-encountered targets, were less likely to find novel shortcuts to targets, and more likely to attempt retracing of the path observed during passive viewing. Based on a priori region-of-interest analyses, SSD participants had hyperactivation of the left hippocampus when passively viewing turns, hyperactivation of the left caudate when finding targets, and hypoactivation of a focal area of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when targets were initially shown during passive viewing. We propose that these brain-behaviour relations may bias or reinforce stimulus-response navigation approaches in SSD and underlie impaired performance when allocentric spatial memory is required, such as when forming efficient shortcuts. This pattern may extend to more general cognitive impairments in SSD that could be used to design remediation strategies.