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Schizophrenia and autism as contrasting minds: neural evidence for the hypo-hyper-intentionality hypothesis.

  • Ciaramidaro A Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany; angela.ciaramidaro@kgu.de.
  • Bölte S Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany; Department of Women's and Children's Health, Center of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (KIND), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden;
  • Schlitt S Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany;
  • Hainz D Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany;
  • Poustka F Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany;
  • Weber B Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany; Psychiatric University Clinics, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland;
  • Bara BG Center for Cognitive Science, University of Turin, Turin, Italy;
  • Freitag C Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany;
  • Walter H Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany.
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  • 2014-09-12
Published in:
  • Schizophrenia bulletin. - 2015
MPFC
autism
intention
mentalising
pSTS
schizophrenia
Adolescent
Adult
Brain
Case-Control Studies
Child Development Disorders, Pervasive
Female
Functional Neuroimaging
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Intention
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Prefrontal Cortex
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia, Paranoid
Social Perception
Temporal Lobe
Theory of Mind
Young Adult
English Both schizophrenia (SCZ) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by mentalizing problems and associated neural dysfunction of the social brain. However, the deficits in mental state attribution are somehow opposed: Whereas patients with SCZ tend to over-attribute intentions to agents and physical events ("hyper-intentionality"), patients with autism treat people as devoid of intentions ("hypo-intentionality"). Here we aimed to investigate whether this hypo-hyper-intentionality hypothesis can be supported by neural evidence during a mentalizing task. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the neural responses and functional connectivity during reading others intention. Scanning was performed in 23 individuals with ASD, 18 with paranoid SCZ and 23 gender and IQ matched control subjects. Both clinical groups showed reduced brain activation compared to controls for the contrast intentional vs physical information processing in left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) for SCZ, and right pSTS in ASD. As predicted, these effects were caused in a group specific way: Relative increased activation for physical information processing in SCZ that was also correlated with positive PANNS score and relative decreased activation for intentional information processing in ASD. Additionally, we could demonstrate opposed connectivity patterns between the right pSTS and vMPFC in the clinical groups, ie, increased for SCZ, decreased for ASD. These findings represent opposed neural signatures in key regions of the social brain as predicted by the hyper-hypo-intentionality hypothesis.
Language
  • English
Open access status
bronze
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Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/206759
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