Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United State of America.
Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United State of America.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 May 25;17(5):e1008985. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008985. eCollection 2021 May.
Poor context integration, the process of incorporating both previous and current information in decision making, is a cognitive symptom of schizophrenia. The maintenance of the contextual information has been shown to be sensitive to changes in excitation-inhibition (EI) balance. Many regions of the brain are sensitive to EI imbalances, however, so it is unknown how systemic manipulations affect the specific regions that are important to context integration. We constructed a multi-structure, biophysically-realistic agent that could perform context-integration as is assessed by the dot pattern expectancy task. The agent included a perceptual network, a memory network, and a decision making system and was capable of successfully performing the dot pattern expectancy task. Systemic manipulation of the agent's EI balance produced localized dysfunction of the memory structure, which resulted in schizophrenia-like deficits at context integration. When the agent's pyramidal cells were less excitatory, the agent fixated upon the cue and initiated responding later than the default agent, which were like the deficits one would predict that individuals on the autistic spectrum would make. This modelling suggests that it may be possible to parse between different types of context integration deficits by adding distractors to context integration tasks and by closely examining a participant's reaction times.
语境整合能力差，即在做决策时整合先前和当前信息的过程，是精神分裂症的一种认知症状。已证明，语境信息的维持对兴奋抑制（EI）平衡的变化很敏感。大脑的许多区域对 EI 失衡都很敏感，但尚不清楚系统干预如何影响对语境整合很重要的特定区域。我们构建了一个多结构、生物物理上逼真的代理，它可以通过点模式期望任务来执行语境整合，评估其能力。代理包括感知网络、记忆网络和决策系统，能够成功执行点模式期望任务。对代理 EI 平衡的系统干预导致记忆结构的局部功能障碍，从而导致类似精神分裂症的语境整合缺陷。当代理的锥体神经元兴奋性降低时，代理会固定在提示上，并比默认代理更晚开始反应，这类似于人们预测自闭症谱系个体可能会出现的缺陷。该模型表明，通过向语境整合任务添加干扰项，并仔细检查参与者的反应时间，可能可以解析不同类型的语境整合缺陷。
