Grant: Michael Smith Fellowship for Research in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a devastating syndrome affecting approximately 1% of the population worldwide. This illness is known by many to be defined by dramatic positive (psychosis, hallucinations and delusions) and negative (lack of drive and motivation) symptoms. Although overlooked for a long time, cognitive deficits are also a cardinal feature of schizophrenia and they contribute substantially to disability too. In fact, cognitive deficits that are already seen prior to the onset of illness and in unaffected family members are better predictors of social function and functional outcome than the symptoms that define this illness. Among other cognitive impairments, people suffering from schizophrenia fail to consolidate and retain novel sequential motor behaviors. This ability is essential for a vast array of human activities, including speech, writing, music playing, sport practice or tool-use. The present research project thus seeks to identify abnormal brain activity in schizophrenia that may account for deficits in motor memory consolidation, the offline process by which an initially fragile memory trace becomes more robust. In particular, this research will aim at dissociating how deficient brain mechanisms occurring respectively during wakefulness and sleep are at play in schizophrenia, as compared to health. To this end, we will use state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques (functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI and electroencephalography, EEG) to map neural activity during practice on a novel sequence of finger movements both at training and retrieval as well as during posttraining rest, in the framework of a sleep deprivation paradigm. It is hoped that findings emerging from this research program will help identifying essential mechanisms in normal memory consolidation and suggest new avenues for translational studies of novel and practical interventions that could ameliorate disabling cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.