Schizophrenia is characterized by marked communication dysfunctions encompassing potential impairments in the processing of social-abstract and non-social-concrete information, especially in everyday situations where multiple modalities are present in the form of speech and gesture. To date, the neurobiological basis of these deficits remains elusive. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 17 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, and 18 matched controls watched videos of an actor speaking, gesturing (unimodal), and both speaking and gesturing (bimodal) about social or non-social events in a naturalistic way. Participants were asked to judge whether each video contains person-related (social) or object-related (non-social) information. When processing social-abstract content, patients showed reduced activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) only in the gesture but not in the speech condition. For non-social-concrete content, remarkably, reduced neural activation for patients in the left postcentral gyrus and the right insula was observed only in the speech condition. Moreover, in the bimodal conditions, patients displayed improved task performance and comparable activation to controls in both social and non-social content. To conclude, patients with schizophrenia displayed modality-specific aberrant neural processing of social and non-social information, which is not present for the bimodal conditions. This finding provides novel insights into dysfunctional multimodal communication in schizophrenia, and may have potential therapeutic implications.

精神分裂症的特征在于明显的沟通障碍，包括在处理社交抽象和非社交具体信息时的潜在障碍，尤其是在日常情况下，以言语和手势形式出现多种形式的情况下。迄今为止，这些缺陷的神经生物学基础仍然难以捉摸。在功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究中，有17位精神分裂症或精神分裂症患者和18位相匹配的对照观看了演员关于社交或非社交事件的讲话，手势（单峰）以及讲话和手势（双峰）的视频以自然主义的方式 要求参与者判断每个视频是否包含与人有关的（社交）或与对象有关的（非社交）信息。在处理社交抽象内容时，患者仅在手势中表现出内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）激活减少，而在言语状态下则没有。对于非社交混凝土含量，仅在言语状态下，观察到左中后回和右岛的患者神经激活减少。此外，在双峰状态下，患者在社交和非社交内容上均表现出更好的任务表现和与对照组相当的激活能力。总之，精神分裂症患者对社交和非社交信息表现出特定于模态的异常神经处理，这在双峰状态下是不存在的。该发现为精神分裂症的功能障碍性多模式交流提供了新颖的见解，并可能具有潜在的治疗意义。