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The Impact of Attention on Speech Entrainment in Clinical High-Risk for Psychosis Individuals
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Victoria R. Poulton1, Tineke Grent-'t-Jong1, Joachim Gross2, Peter J. Uhlhaas1; 1Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, 2University of Münster, Germany
Schizophrenia and early-stage psychosis present with alterations to auditory processing, thought organization, and language comprehension. Language-related symptoms and associated neural correlates serve as candidate biomarkers for early detection and outcome prediction in individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P). However, studies investigating language processing deficits in these individuals are limited, and the contribution of factors such as attentional control in language processing deficits remain unclear. In the current study, we investigate neural entrainment to continuous speech with 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG) in a sample of 21 CHR-Ps and 28 healthy controls during active and passive story listening. During active listening, speech was presented as a short story audiobook, and story comprehension was measured with a subsequent questionnaire. During passive listening, participants performed a Flanker task and were simultaneously presented with either the same audiobook, or one that was made unintelligible (time-reversed). We measured entrainment between the speech envelope and the source-reconstructed data from bilateral auditory cortex in the delta, theta, and alpha frequency bands with a Mutual Information (MI) approach. We selected delta (1-4 Hz) and theta (4-7 Hz) bands for their involvement in speech processing [1, 2] and based on prior findings in a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study by our group [3]. We also investigated group differences in the alpha (7-10 Hz) band, as power in time-frequency responses in this range has been proposed as a proxy for attentional control and allocation during listening [e.g., 4]. The behavioural results showed impaired story comprehension in CHR-Ps compared to controls, while there was no group difference in Flanker task performance. In both groups, the EEG data revealed stronger delta-band entrainment during active compared to passive listening. We also observed group differences in theta-band entrainment, which was lower in CHR-Ps independent of condition, and in alpha-band entrainment, which was lower in CHR-Ps but only during passive listening. The observed group differences in theta entrainment and story comprehension confirm that language processing is already impaired in CHR-Ps, while deficits in alpha entrainment during passive listening point to the contribution of impaired top-down attentional control. The current findings suggest that neural entrainment to speech could serve as a potential biomarker for psychosis and highlights the need for understanding both bottom-up and top-down deficits in the mechanistic explanation of language-related symptoms. [1] Di Liberto et al. (2015) ‘Low-Frequency Cortical Entrainment to Speech Reflects Phoneme-Level Processing’, Curr. Biol. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.08.030. [2] Gross et al. (2013) ‘Speech Rhythms and Multiplexed Oscillatory Sensory Coding in the Human Brain’, PLoS Biol. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001752. [3] Grent-’t-Jong et al. (2024) ‘Entrainment of neural oscillations during language processing in Early-Stage schizophrenia’, NeuroImage Clin. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2024.103695. [4] Wöstmann et al. (2017) ‘The Human Neural Alpha Response to Speech is a Proxy of Attentional Control’, Cereb. Cortex. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhx074.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Disorders: Developmental