Stahnke, Antje; Zengaffinen, Francilia Sabrina; Furger, Stephan; Dierks, Thomas; Federspiel, Andrea; Hatzinger, Martin; König, Thomas; Nick, Beat; Rapp, Charlotte; Stegmayer, Katharina; Strik, Werner; van Harten, Peter; Walther, Sebastian; Wiest, Roland; Papmeyer, Martina (3 November 2017). Psychopathology in Motion – Systems Neuroscience of Motor Function in Psychosis (Unpublished). In: 3rd OHBM ALPINE CHAPTER SYMPOSIUM. 3. - 4.11.2017.
Background:
Psychoses are aetiologically complex disorders that affect about 1-2% of the population during their lifetime. Impairments in motor function that occur in psychosis have been associated with aberrant neural activity and structure. It is still unclear whether differences in motor ability in healthy individuals are similarly related to distinct brain activation patterns in motor-related brain areas, suggesting that impairments in psychosis patients are extreme values on a trait continuum. In the future, we aim to examine the neural underpinnings of motor function on the spectrum from health to psychosis. Therefore, we designed tasks to investigate different aspects of motor function, like movement execution as well as the perception of biological motion. In the present work, we aimed to test these paradigms in terms of validity and feasibility.
Methods:
We conducted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in healthy subjects. During MRI measurement subjects perform a foot movement as well as a biological motion recognition task. In the former, participants are instructed to perform an ankle movement, guided by a pedal. In the latter, short videos of point light displays of human movements, in contrast to random dot motion patterns are presented to the participants.
Results:
We are presenting preliminary results from the fMRI examination. During the foot movement task, we found significant activation in the primary motor cortex, as expected. In the point light walker task, we found significant activation patterns as shown in other studies dealing with perception of biological motion, including for instance the posterior superior temporal sulcus and gyrus as well as the fusiform gyrus.
Conclusion:
Our results provide evidence, that the tasks we designed are valid and feasible paradigms to examine the neural underpinnings of the different aspects of motor function we are interested in. In the future, we will use these paradigms to investigate motor function not only healthy controls, but on the spectrum from health to psychosis. Therefore, we will include three additional groups: psychosis patients, subjects with a high clinical risk for psychosis and first-degree relatives of psychosis patients. In addition, we will carry out neuropsychological tests, questionnaires, a heart rate variability assessment, as well as instrumental examinations. Moreover, we will use the two motor paradigms described above during an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment.
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