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Brain activity and connectivity differences in reward value discrimination during effort computation in schizophrenia

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Abstract

Negative symptoms in the motivational domain are strongly correlated with deficits in social and occupational functioning in schizophrenia. However, the neural substrates underlying these symptoms remain largely unknown. Twenty-eight adults with schizophrenia and twenty healthy volunteers underwent functional magnetic resonance while completing a lottery game designed to capture reward-related cognitive processes. Each trial demanded an initial investment of effort in form of key presses to increase the odds of winning. Brain activity in response to different reward cues (1 euro versus 1 cent) was compared between groups. Whereas controls invested more effort in improving their chances to win 1 euro compared to 1 cent in the lottery game, patients invested similarly high amounts of effort in both reward conditions. The neuroimaging analysis revealed lower neural activity in the bilateral caudate and cingulo-opercular circuits and decreased effective connectivity between reward-associated areas and neural nodes in the frontoparietal and salience network in response to high- versus low-reward conditions in schizophrenia patients compared to controls. Effective connectivity differences across conditions were associated with amotivation symptoms in patients. Overall, our data provide the evidence of alterations in neural activity in the caudate and cingulo-opercular “task maintenance” circuits and frontoparietal effective connectivity with reward-associated nodes as possible underlying mechanisms of reward value discrimination deficits affecting effort computation in schizophrenia.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the volunteers who kindly agreed to participate in this study. This work was supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCiii), Proyectos de Investigación y Salud, Grant reference PI18/00053.

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Author notes

  1. Clara Pretus and Daniel Bergé shared first authorship.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departament de Psiquiatria i Medicina Legal, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Clara Pretus, Daniel Bergé, Xavier Guell, Victor Pérez & Óscar Vilarroya

  2. Institut Hospital del Mar d’Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM), Barcelona, Spain

    Clara Pretus, Daniel Bergé, Victor Pérez & Óscar Vilarroya

  3. Institut de Neuropsiquiatria i Addiccions, Hospital del Mar, Barcelona, Spain

    Daniel Bergé & Victor Pérez

  4. Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red, Área de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), Madrid, Spain

    Daniel Bergé & Victor Pérez

  5. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Xavier Guell

  6. Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

    Xavier Guell

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  1. Clara Pretus
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  2. Daniel Bergé
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  3. Xavier Guell
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Correspondence to Clara Pretus.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standards

The study was approved by the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute Ethical Committee and was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. After a full explanation of the study, written informed consent was obtained from all participants before taking part in the study.

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Communicated by Sebastian Walther.

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Pretus, C., Bergé, D., Guell, X. et al. Brain activity and connectivity differences in reward value discrimination during effort computation in schizophrenia. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 271, 647–659 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-020-01145-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-020-01145-8

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