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Poster B147 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Oscillatory traveling waves reveal predictive coding abnormalities in schizophrenia
Andrea Alamia1 (), Dario Gordillo2, Eka Chkonia3, Maya Roinishvili4, Celine Cappe1, Michael Herzog2; 1CerCo - CNRS, 2Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 3Department of Psychiatry, Tbilisi State Medical University (TSMU), 4Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences, Free University of Tbilisi
The computational mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders are hotly debated. One hypothesis, grounded in the Bayesian predictive coding framework, proposes that schizophrenia patients have abnormalities in encoding prior beliefs about the environment, resulting in abnormal sensory inference, which can explain core aspects of the psychopathology, such as some of its symptoms. Here, we tested this hypothesis by identifying oscillatory traveling waves as neural signatures of predictive coding. By analyzing a EEG dataset. comprising 146 schizophrenia patients and 96 age-matched healthy controls, we found that schizophrenia patients have stronger top-down alpha-band traveling waves compared to healthy controls during resting state, reflecting stronger precise priors at higher levels of the predictive processing hierarchy. Conversely, we found stronger bottom-up alpha-band waves in schizophrenia patients during a visual task reflecting an alteration of lower sensory priors. Our results yield a novel spatial-based characterization of oscillatory dynamics in schizophrenia, considering brain rhythms as traveling waves and providing a unique framework to study the different components involved in a predictive coding scheme. Altogether, our findings significantly advance our understanding of the mechanisms involved in fundamental pathophysiological aspects of schizophrenia, promoting a more comprehensive and hypothesis-driven approach to psychiatric disorders.
Keywords: Predictive Coding Schizophrenia Traveling Waves Computational Psychiatry