Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Schizophrenia is a debilitating illness that affects 1% of the population. In addition to greatly reducing the quality of life of affected individuals and their families, schizophrenia is associated with substantial costs due to lost productivity. While loss of motivation is a key feature of schizophrenia, existing means of assessing motivated behaviour rely on subjective measures that fail to capture important aspects of motivation. Schizophrenia patients exhibit deficits in specific facets of motivated behaviour, including impairments in exploratory behaviour, greater tendency to engage in passive over non-passive activities, and reduced engagement in social interactions. The development of objective means of assessing these deficits would be a significant advancement in progression towards potential treatment. The current project evaluates motivation in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls using three objective tasks, by a combination of motion capture and virtual reality technology: Novelty Exploration Task (participants are alone in a typical office containing commonplace and unique objects); Activity Preference Task (participants are given the option of watching a film (passive) or playing a computer game using physical gestures (non-passive)); and Social Interaction Task (participants converse with a virtual human character). Participants will also undergo comprehensive clinical characterization. Further, magnetic resonance imaging will be used to determine how brain structure and connectivity relate to specific aspects of motivated behaviour. Preliminary data from these objective tasks suggest that this novel approach may be a valuable means of measuring motivation in schizophrenia. Ultimately, this approach may provide a rapid and reliable means both for assessment and for guiding treatment, and identify specific brain areas linked to deficits in motivated behaviour.