Embodied cognition: researching a new paradigm to understand Schizophrenia and the relationship between brain and body

• Grant number: 22/03209-7
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Initial Project
• Start date: March 01, 2023
• End date: February 28, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine - Psychiatry
• Principal Investigator: Ary Gadelha de Alencar Araripe Neto
• Grantee: Ary Gadelha de Alencar Araripe Neto
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: André Zugman ; Andrea Parolin Jackowski ; Cristiano de Souza Noto ; João Ricardo Sato ; Natália Bezerra Mota ; Nicolas Andres Crossley Karmelic
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/00159-4 - Negative symptoms in schizophrenia: evaluation of the predictive power of a voice recognition protocol and its recognition protocol and its correlation with standardized scales., BP.IC

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a disease that affects millions of people worldwide, and current treatments are limited in promoting their functional recovery. Although schizophrenia affects behavior globally, most studies investigate brain circuits and symptoms separately, adding a barrier to advancing its neurobiological understanding. Embodied Cognition is a concept that proposes the association of perception, emotional response, and Cognition with motor instances and has not yet been explored in a structured way in schizophrenia. The corticostriatal pathways integrate emotional, cognitive, and motor inputs and are altered in schizophrenia, being chosen for the initial exploration of the biological substrate of the interrelation of the investigated measures. We hypothesize that lower functional connectivity between the DLPFC (DorsoLateral Prefrontal Cortex), a region associated with decision making and eye movements' control, and the dorsal striatum, an associative region with more remarkable alteration of the dopaminergic signal in schizophrenia, will be associated with less eye movement during visual search, worse performance in executive functions and lower correlation of the other measures with each other. The main objective will be to investigate the association between eye search movement during a cognitive bias task and functional connectivity between DLPFC and Dorsal striatum in people with and without schizophrenia. Eighty patients with schizophrenia and 80 healthy controls matched by sex, age, and educational level will be recruited. The baseline assessment will involve a diagnostic interview, measures of emotion regulation, motor skills, Cognition, and psychopathology. Standard measures will be used together in parallel to automated measures to standardize new assessment technologies. Automated measurements will be collected using Eye-tracker equipment for ocular motricity assessment and voice recorders for emotional evaluation. All subjects will perform image acquisition at rest in a 3T scanner to investigate the relationship between functional connectivity by graph analysis of the BOLD signal (Blood-Oxygen Level Dependent) and the measures studied. The results can inform how the integration between emotional, motor, and cognitive processes occurs in people with and without schizophrenia, clarifying the extremes of normal functioning and indicating new perspectives for diagnosing and treating the disease. (AU)