Characterizing Clinical and Pharmacological Neuroimaging Biomarkers

Cognition rarely occurs in the 'real world' in isolation, and typically occurs under emotional influences that may alter how cognition occurs. Understanding these motivational and cognitive interactions will help better assess mechanisms that underlie the cognitive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

To better understand the effect of emotion on cognitions, this study will examine the effect of reward processing on working memory in patients with schizophrenia. To this end, this will be a two-pronged approach.

The first prong, is to understand the neural mechanisms of incentivized spatial working memory processes. fMRI will be used and a paradigm will be employed that combines reward processing and working memory to understand how patients with schizophrenia recruit neural systems in response to rewarded working memory.

To further understand this, this study will compare the neural effects in patients with schizophrenia with patients with depression, another group of psychiatric patients who also suffer from cognitive and motivational deficits. Both of these groups suffer from cognitive and motivational deficits, yet the treatments and disease presentations differ.

It is hypothesized that the ways in which cognitive and motivational processes interact in the brain will have some similarities, but also differences, that distinguish the two psychiatric illnesses. As part of this aim, a group of typical, healthy adults subjects will be recruited as a control. A subset of healthy participants that passed the medical and psychiatric screen will be invited to participate in the ketamine portion of the study which will be completed during the MRI session.