Abnormal cortical neural synchrony during working memory in schizophrenia

Objective: To better understand the origins of working memory (WM) impairment in schizophrenia we investigated cortical oscillatory activity in people with schizophrenia (PSZ) while they performed a WM task requiring encoding, maintenance, and retrieval/manipulation processes of spatial information. Methods: We examined time-frequency synchronous energy of cortical source signals that were derived from magnetoencephalography (MEG) localized to cortical regions using WM-related hemodynamic responses and individualized structural head-models. Results: Compared to thirteen healthy controls (HC), twelve PSZ showed performance deficits regardless of WM-load or duration. During encoding, PSZ had early theta and delta event-related synchrony (ERS) deficits in prefrontal and visual cortices which worsened with greater memory load and predicted WM performance. During prolonged maintenance of material, PSZ showed deficient beta event-related desynchrony (ERD) in dorsolateral prefrontal, posterior parietal, and visual cortices. In retrieval, PSZ showed reduced delta/theta ERS in the anterior prefrontal and ventral visual cortices and diminished gamma ERS in the premotor and posterior parietal cortices. Conclusions: Although beta/gamma cortical neural oscillatory deficits for maintenance/retrieval are evident during WM, the abnormal prefrontal theta-frequency ERS for encoding is most predictive of poor WM in schizophrenia. Significance: Time-frequency-spatial analysis identified process-and frequency-specific neural synchrony abnormalities underlying WM deficits in schizophrenia. (C) 2017 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.