Translational studies to specify attentional deficits in schizophrenia: amplificatory and inhibitory mechanisms in multisensory information selection

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Oliver Gruber; Dr. Tobias Melcher
• Subject Area: Biological Psychiatry
• Term: from 2012 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 226680235

Attention is a psychological construct to describe neurocognitive processes of information selection. Accordingly, attention becomes especially important in situations in which relevant and irrelevant information compete for priority in cognitive processing. Thereby, at the sub-procedural level, amplificatory mechanisms to increase task-relevant processing can be distinguished from inhibitory mechanisms that decrease the processing of task-irrelevant information. Building upon prior work of the proposers, the present study project aims at a systematic investigation of amplificatory and inhibitory attentional sub-processes by state-of-theart neuroimaging techniques. The planned investigations comprise, first, a series of basic cognitive neuroscientific studies on the neural implementation of attentional sub-processes in the healthy human brain. Second, translational clinical investigations should define potential disturbances of these attentional subprocesses in schizophrenia patients, in terms of specific pathophysiological correlates of the well established selective attentional deficits in this disorder. Hence, the proposed investigations will provide important new insights in the neural mechanisms of information processing in the healthy brain as well as in the pathophysiology of attentional deficits in schizophrenia.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland