Executive Control and Associated Brain Activity in Children With Familial High-Risk of Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder: A Danish Register-based Study.

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES: Impaired executive control is a potential prognostic and endophenotypic marker of schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BP). Assessing children with familial high-risk (FHR) of SZ or BP enables characterization of early risk markers and we hypothesize that they express impaired executive control as well as aberrant brain activation compared to population-based control (PBC) children. STUDY DESIGN: Using a flanker task, we examined executive control together with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 11- to 12-year-old children with FHR of SZ (FHR-SZ) or FHR of BP (FHR-BP) and PBC children as part of a register-based, prospective cohort-study; The Danish High Risk and Resilience study-VIA 11. STUDY RESULTS: We included 85 (44% female) FHR-SZ, 63 (52% female) FHR-BP and 98 (50% female) PBC in the analyses. Executive control effects, caused by the spatial visuomotor conflict, showed no differences between groups. Bayesian ANOVA of reaction time (RT) variability, quantified by the coefficient of variation (CVRT), revealed a group effect with similarly higher CVRT in FHR-BP and FHR-SZ compared to PBC (BF10 = 6.82). The fMRI analyses revealed no evidence for between-group differences in task-related brain activation. Post hoc analyses excluding children with psychiatric illness yielded same results. CONCLUSION: FHR-SZ and FHR-BP at age 11-12 show intact ability to resolve a spatial visuomotor conflict and neural efficacy. The increased variability in RT may reflect difficulties in maintaining sustained attention. Since variability in RT was independent of existing psychiatric illness, it may reflect a potential endophenotypic marker of risk.

The recent history of afferent stimulation modulates corticospinal excitability.

BACKGROUND: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is widely used to probe corticospinal excitability and fast sensorimotor integration in the primary motor hand area (M1-HAND). A conditioning electrical stimulus, applied to the contralateral hand, can suppress the motor evoked potential (MEP) elicited by TMS of M1-HAND when the afferent stimulus arrives in M1-HAND at the time of TMS. The magnitude of this short-latency afferent inhibition (SAI) is expressed as the ratio between the conditioned and unconditioned MEP amplitude. OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS: We hypothesized that corticospinal excitability and SAI are influenced by the recent history of peripheral electrical stimulation. METHODS: In twenty healthy participants, we recorded MEPs from the right first dorsal interosseus muscle. MEPs were evoked by single-pulse TMS of the left M1-HAND alone (unconditioned TMS) or by TMS preceded by electrical stimulation of the right index finger ("homotopic" conditioning) or little finger ("heterotopic" conditioning). The three conditions were either pseudo-randomly intermixed or delivered in blocks in which a single condition was repeated five or ten times. MEP amplitudes and SAI magnitudes were compared using linear mixed-effect models and one-way ANOVAs. RESULTS: All stimulation protocols consistently produced SAI, which was stronger after homotopic stimulation. Randomly intermingling the three stimulation conditions reduced the relative magnitude of homotopic and heterotopic SAI as opposed to blocked stimulation. The apparent attenuation of SAI was caused by a suppression of the unconditioned but not the conditioned MEP amplitude during the randomly intermixed pattern. CONCLUSION(S): The recent history of afferent stimulation modulates corticospinal excitability. This "history effect" impacts on the relative magnitude of SAI depending on how conditioned and unconditioned responses are intermixed and needs to be taken into consideration when probing afferent inhibition and corticospinal excitability.

Noise-robust cortical tracking of attended speech in real-world acoustic scenes.

Selectively attending to one speaker in a multi-speaker scenario is thought to synchronize low-frequency cortical activity to the attended speech signal. In recent studies, reconstruction of speech from single-trial electroencephalogram (EEG) data has been used to decode which talker a listener is attending to in a two-talker situation. It is currently unclear how this generalizes to more complex sound environments. Behaviorally, speech perception is robust to the acoustic distortions that listeners typically encounter in everyday life, but it is unknown whether this is mirrored by a noise-robust neural tracking of attended speech. Here we used advanced acoustic simulations to recreate real-world acoustic scenes in the laboratory. In virtual acoustic realities with varying amounts of reverberation and number of interfering talkers, listeners selectively attended to the speech stream of a particular talker. Across the different listening environments, we found that the attended talker could be accurately decoded from single-trial EEG data irrespective of the different distortions in the acoustic input. For highly reverberant environments, speech envelopes reconstructed from neural responses to the distorted stimuli resembled the original clean signal more than the distorted input. With reverberant speech, we observed a late cortical response to the attended speech stream that encoded temporal modulations in the speech signal without its reverberant distortion. Single-trial attention decoding accuracies based on 40-50s long blocks of data from 64 scalp electrodes were equally high (80-90% correct) in all considered listening environments and remained statistically significant using down to 10 scalp electrodes and short (<30-s) unaveraged EEG segments. In contrast to the robust decoding of the attended talker we found that decoding of the unattended talker deteriorated with the acoustic distortions. These results suggest that cortical activity tracks an attended speech signal in a way that is invariant to acoustic distortions encountered in real-life sound environments. Noise-robust attention decoding additionally suggests a potential utility of stimulus reconstruction techniques in attention-controlled brain-computer interfaces.