title: Deficient attention modulation of lateralized alpha power in schizophrenia.
abstract: Modulation of 8-14 Hz (alpha) activity in posterior brain regions is associated with covert attention deployment in visuospatial tasks. Alpha power decrease contralateral to to-be-attended stimuli is believed to foster subsequent processing, such as retention of task-relevant input. Degradation of this alpha-regulation mechanism may reflect an early stage of disturbed attention regulation contributing to impaired attention and working memory commonly found in schizophrenia. The present study tested this hypothesis of early disturbed attention regulation by examining alpha power modulation in a lateralized cued delayed response task in 14 schizophrenia patients (SZ) and 25 healthy controls (HC). Participants were instructed to remember the location of a 100-ms saccade-target cue in the left or right visual hemifield in order to perform a delayed saccade to that location after a retention interval. As expected, alpha power decrease during the retention interval was larger in contralateral than ipsilateral posterior regions, and SZ showed less of this lateralization than did HC. In particular, SZ failed to show hemifield-specific alpha modulation in posterior right hemisphere. Results suggest less efficient modulation of alpha oscillations that are considered critical for attention deployment and item encoding and, hence, may affect subsequent spatial working memory performance.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
authors: Thomas
authors: T
authors: Kustermann
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
authors: Brigitte
authors: B
authors: Rockstroh
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
authors: Johanna
authors: J
authors: Kienle
authors: Department of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.
authors: Gregory A
authors: GA
authors: Miller
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.|Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors: Tzvetan
authors: T
authors: Popov
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000513:Alpha Rhythm; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015225:Magnetoencephalography; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012438:Saccades; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D065852:Spatial Memory / Q000502:physiology; D065855:Spatial Processing / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology
keywords: Alpha oscillations; Cued delayed response; Magnetoencephalography; Schizophrenia