Cognitive impairment is a well-established behavioral phenotype of affective and non-affective psychosis including individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis. However, it remains unclear whether cognitive performance declines or remains stable over time and which commonalities in performance deficits, mechanisms of development and neural underpinnings are shared by affective and non-affective psychosis, affective disorders in general and in individuals at CHR for psychosis.
Four different speakers will address the common phenomenology, neural patterns and development of cognitive impairment, emotional processing and poor social functioning at different stages of psychosis and affective disorders. The complementary approaches discussed by the speakers include structural and functional imaging, supervised machine learning and stratification. Anne Kathrin Fett will present recent research on cognitive functioning in a large sample of patients at first hospitalization for a psychotic disorder who have been followed 20-years into the illness. Her findings indicate that cognitive decline is not specific to schizophrenia but present across psychotic disorders.
Franziska Knolle will present her findings on the neural correlation of non-motivational salience using an fMRI-based visual oddball task. Using computational modeling she will demonstrate evidence that early-psychosis patients jump to conclusions, in a novel form of the beads task.
Gemma Modinos will present her recent data using cross-species, translational neuroimaging methods to explore the role that abnormalities in emotion-related brain systems may play in the psychosis risk and onset.
Lana Kambeitz-Ilankovic will introduce the machine learning findings on neurocognitive subgroups with distinct psychopathological and brain patterns identified transdiagnostically.