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Unexpected higher resilience to distraction during visual working memory in schizophrenia

View ORCID ProfileYijie Zhao, Xuemei Ran, View ORCID ProfileLi Zhang, Ruyuan Zhang, View ORCID ProfileYixuan Ku
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/567859
Yijie Zhao
1The Shanghai Key Lab of Brain Functional Genomics, Shanghai Changning-ECNU Mental Health Center, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062 China
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Xuemei Ran
1The Shanghai Key Lab of Brain Functional Genomics, Shanghai Changning-ECNU Mental Health Center, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062 China
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Li Zhang
1The Shanghai Key Lab of Brain Functional Genomics, Shanghai Changning-ECNU Mental Health Center, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062 China
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Ruyuan Zhang
2Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, Department of Radiology and Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA
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Yixuan Ku
1The Shanghai Key Lab of Brain Functional Genomics, Shanghai Changning-ECNU Mental Health Center, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062 China
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ABSTRACT

Visual working memory (VWM) and distractibility are two core executive functions in human cognition. It has been suggested that schizophrenia (SZ) patients exhibit worse VWM performance and lower resilience to distraction compared with healthy control (HC) subjects. Previous studies, however, have largely investigated these two functions separately. It still remains unclear what are the mechanisms of the deficits, especially the interactions between the two cognitive domains. Here we modify the standard delay-estimation task in VWM and explicitly add distractors in the task so as to examine the two domains simultaneously. We find that SZ indeed exhibit worse performance compared with HC in almost all VWM load and distraction levels, a result consistent with most prior experimental findings. But adding distractors does not selectively impose larger impacts on SZ performance. Furthermore, unlike most previous studies that only focused on behavioral performance, we use the variable precision model to disentangle the distraction effect on different computational components of VWM (resources and resources allocation variability etc.). Surprisingly, adding distractors significantly elevates resources allocation variability—a parameter describing the heterogeneity of resource allocation across different targets—in HC but not in SZ. This counterintuitive result suggests that the internal VWM process in SZ is less interfered by the distractors. However, this unexpected higher resilience to distraction might be associated with less flexible cognitive control mechanisms. In sum, our work demonstrates that multiple cognitive functions might jointly contribute to dysfunctions in SZ and their interactions might manifest differently from merely summing their independent effects.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 05, 2019.
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Unexpected higher resilience to distraction during visual working memory in schizophrenia
Yijie Zhao, Xuemei Ran, Li Zhang, Ruyuan Zhang, Yixuan Ku
bioRxiv 567859; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/567859
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Unexpected higher resilience to distraction during visual working memory in schizophrenia
Yijie Zhao, Xuemei Ran, Li Zhang, Ruyuan Zhang, Yixuan Ku
bioRxiv 567859; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/567859

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