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  • Latent inhibition (LI) is an important model for understanding cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. Disruption of LI is thought to result from an inability to ignore irrelevant stimuli. The study investigated LI in schizophrenic patients by using Pavlovian conditioning of electrodermal responses in a complete within-subject design. Thirty-two schizophrenic patients (16 acute, unmedicated and 16 medicated patients) and 16 healthy control subjects (matched with respect to age and gender) participated in the study. The experiment consisted of two stages: preexposure and conditioning. During preexposure two visual stimuli were presented. one of which served as the to-be-conditioned stimulus (CSp + ) and the other one was the not-to-be-conditioned stimulus (CSp - ) during the following conditioning ( = acquisition). During acquisition, two novel visual stimuli(CSn + and CSn - ) were introduced. A reaction time task was used as the unconditioned stimulus (US). LI was defined as the difference in response differentiation observed between preexposed and non-preexposed sets of CS + and CS - . During preexposure, the schizophrenic patients did not differ in electrodermal responding from the control subjects, neither concerning the extent of orienting nor the course of habituation. The exposure to novel stimuli at the beginning of the acquisition elicited reduced orienting responses in unmedicated patients compared to medicated patients and control subjects. LI was observed in medicated schizophrenic patients and healthy controls, but not in acute unmedicated patients. Furthermore LI was found to be correlated with the duration of illness: it was attenuated in patients who had suffered their first psychotic episode.

  • Neuroimaging studies on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suggest dysfunctional reward processing, with hypo-responsiveness during reward anticipation in the reward system including the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). In this study, we investigated the association between ADHD related behaviors and the reward system using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a non-clinical sample. Participants were 31 healthy, female undergraduate students with varying levels of self-reported ADHD related behaviors measured by the adult ADHD self-report scale. The anticipation of different types of reward was investigated: monetary reward, punishment avoidance, and verbal feedback. All three reward anticipation conditions were found to be associated with increased brain activation in the reward system, with the highest activation in the monetary reward anticipation condition, followed by the punishment avoidance anticipation condition, and the lowest activation in the verbal feedback anticipation condition. Most interestingly, in all three conditions, NAcc activation was negatively correlated with ADHD related behaviors. In conclusion, our results from a non-clinical sample are in accordance with reported deficits in the reward system in ADHD patients: the higher the number and severity of ADHD related behaviors, the lower the neural responses in the dopaminergic driven reward anticipation task. Thus, our data support current aetiological models of ADHD which assume that deficits in the reward system might be responsible for many of the ADHD related behaviors.

Last update from database: 04.06.25, 15:35 (UTC)