🎉 Paper accepted! “Facilitation of sensorimotor temporal recalibration mechanisms by cerebellar tDCS in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and healthy individuals.” A big congratulation to Christina for this significant achievement! #ScientificReports #Neuroscience #SchizophreniaResearch

Schmitter, C.V. & Straube, B. (2024). Facilitation of sensorimotor temporal recalibration mechanisms by cerebellar tDCS in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and healthy individuals. Scientific Reports

The main findings of the study are as follows:

Cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was found to facilitate sensorimotor temporal recalibration in both individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and healthy controls.
This suggests a potential therapeutic role for tDCS in addressing sensorimotor timing deficits associated with schizophrenia.
The study highlights the cerebellum’s significant role in sensorimotor timing and its modulation using non-invasive brain stimulation techniques.

Abstract

Core symptoms in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), like hallucinations or ego-disturbances, have been associated with a failure of internal forward models to predict the sensory outcomes of self-generated actions. Importantly, forward model predictions must also be able to flexibly recalibrate to changing environmental conditions, for example to account for additional delays between action and outcome. We investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can be used to improve these sensorimotor temporal recalibration mechanisms in patients and healthy individuals. While receiving tDCS on the cerebellum, temporo-parietal junction, supplementary motor area, or sham stimulation, patients with SSD and healthy control participants were repeatedly exposed to delays between actively or passively elicited button presses and auditory outcomes. Effects of this procedure on temporal perception were assessed with a delay detection task. Similar recalibration outcomes and faciliatory effects of cerebellar tDCS on recalibration were observed in SSD and healthy individuals. Our findings indicate that sensorimotor recalibration mechanisms may be preserved in SSD and highlight the importance of the cerebellum in both patients and healthy individuals for this process. They further suggest that cerebellar tDCS could be a promising tool for addressing deficits in action-outcome monitoring and related adaptive sensorimotor processes in SSD.

Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.28.559952v1