Frontotemporal hypoactivity during a reality monitoring paradigm is associated with delusions in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

INTRODUCTION: Impaired monitoring of internally generated information has been proposed to be one component in the development and maintenance of delusions. The present study investigated the neural correlates underlying the monitoring processes and whether they were associated with delusions. METHODS: Twenty healthy controls and 19 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders were administrated a reality monitoring paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging. During encoding participants were instructed to associate a statement with either a presented (viewed condition) or an imagined picture (imagined condition). During the monitoring session in the scanner, participants were presented with old and new statements and their task was to identify whether a given statement was associated with the viewed condition, imagined condition, or if it was new. RESULTS: Patients showed significantly reduced accuracy in the imagined condition with performance negatively associated with degree of delusions. This was accompanied with reduced activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left hippocampus in the patient group. The severity of delusions was negatively correlated with the blood-oxygenation-level dependent response in the left hippocampus. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that weakened monitoring is associated with delusions in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, and that this may be mediated by a frontotemporal dysfunction.

Arousal Modulates Activity in the Medial Temporal Lobe during a Short-Term Relational Memory Task.

This study investigated the effect of arousal on short-term relational memory and its underlying cortical network. Seventeen healthy participants performed a picture by location, short-term relational memory task using emotional pictures. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure the blood-oxygenation-level dependent signal relative to task. Subjects' own ratings of the pictures were used to obtain subjective arousal ratings. Subjective arousal was found to have a dose-dependent effect on activations in the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, and in higher order visual areas. Serial position analyses showed that high arousal trials produced a stronger primacy and recency effect than low arousal trials. The results indicate that short-term relational memory may be facilitated by arousal and that this may be modulated by a dose-response function in arousal-driven neuronal regions.