Objective
Real-world events occur not only over extended regions of space but also over extended periods of time. On the time scale of cognition, for example, it takes a few hundred milliseconds to utter a word, a few seconds to utter a sentence, and sometimes much longer to convey an idea. The information gathered at each particular moment, however, only becomes meaningful in the context of previous events. The capacity to accumulate information over time, thus, is crucial to our functioning in an ever-changing world. Yet there is surprisingly little research on how the brain integrates information over time.
This project aims to investigate the temporal domain of information processing in human brain at the network level. We will apply novel inter-subject correlation (ISC) approach for analyzing fMRI network organization evoked by continuous and complex stimulation, such as stories and movies. Recently, in healthy subjects, we revealed hierarchy of information processing over time from early sensory areas toward high order perceptual and cognitive areas. Here we will focus on demonstrating the breakdown of such processing in one of the major psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia patients suffer from a failure to integrate information at different scales/domains including time. This project aims to implement the ISC in first-episode schizophrenia patients and their healthy siblings, which are known to be more prone to the disease. Preliminary results in the patient group demonstrated impaired hierarchy with processing intact in low level but disturbed in high level, in both visual and auditory modalities. The sibling group showed an intermediate effect. We believe that better understanding of the underlying neural circuit involved in information processing in schizophrenia patients and their healthy siblings may assist in early identification of functional neural markers for the disease and facilitate development of improved methods for early diagnosis.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG
See other projects for this call
Coordinator
64239 Tel Aviv
Israel