Grant: Doctoral Research Award - Priority Announcement: Patient-Oriented Research

Schizophrenia is characterized by deficits in the performance of most mental tasks, and these deficits become more pronounced as the difficulty of these tasks increases. One area in which these deficits are consistently found is in selective attention, which involves directing awareness to particular aspects of the external world that require further processing. Although this is a complex cognitive task, it can be subdivided into two phases: deciding which aspects to process, and the implementation of that processing. The goal of this research project is to elucidate the differences in the implementation of selective attention between schizophrenia patients and healthy volunteers. Specifically, the goal is to capitalize on the excellent spatial and temporal resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), respectively, to investigate the differences in brain activity involved in the implementation of selective attention. The use of multiple methods of brain imaging will allow a more comprehensive analysis of how these differences in activity lead to performance deficits in schizophrenia, and have the potential to lead to the discovery of new treatments and medications targeted to improving cognitive function in schizophrenia.