Activation of midbrain and ventral striatal regions implicates salience processing during a modified beads task.

<h4>Introduction</h4>Metacognition, i.e. critically reflecting on and monitoring one's own reasoning, has been linked behaviorally to the emergence of delusions and is a focus of cognitive therapy in patients with schizophrenia. However, little is known about the neural processing u...

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Autores principales: Christine Esslinger, Urs Braun, Frederike Schirmbeck, Andreia Santos, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Mathias Zink, Peter Kirsch
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2013
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/089ca23a1eeb46ca9516f42df2c29cec
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Sumario:<h4>Introduction</h4>Metacognition, i.e. critically reflecting on and monitoring one's own reasoning, has been linked behaviorally to the emergence of delusions and is a focus of cognitive therapy in patients with schizophrenia. However, little is known about the neural processing underlying metacognitive function. To address this issue, we studied brain activity during a modified beads task which has been used to measure a "Jumping to Conclusions" (JTC) bias in schizophrenia patients.<h4>Methods</h4>We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify neural systems active in twenty-five healthy subjects when solving a modified version of the "beads task", which requires a probabilistic decision after a variable amount of data has been requested by the participants. We assessed brain activation over the duration of a trial and at the time point of decision making.<h4>Results</h4>Analysis of activation during the whole process of probabilistic reasoning showed an extended network including the prefronto-parietal executive functioning network as well as medial parieto-occipital regions. During the decision process alone, activity in midbrain and ventral striatum was detected, as well as in thalamus, medial occipital cortex and anterior insula.<h4>Conclusions</h4>Our data show that probabilistic reasoning shares neural substrates with executive functions. In addition, our finding that brain regions commonly associated with salience processing are active during probabilistic reasoning identifies a candidate mechanism that could underlie the behavioral link between dopamine-dependent aberrant salience and JTC in schizophrenia. Further studies with delusional schizophrenia patients will have to be performed to substantiate this link.