Neurophysiological dynamics related to perception, action, and language in schizophrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia disrupts both how people perceive the world and how they express and act on their thoughts, yet these symptoms are usually studied separately. Using magnetoencephalography during multisensory and motor tasks, we tested whether reduced event-related beta-band (15 to 30 hertz) modulation, a signal implicated in predictive control, provides a candidate neural marker across these domains. Compared to healthy individuals, patients showed diminished beta changes during sensory processing and movement completion, suggesting reduced flexibility in updating internal models. This neural pattern covaried with audiovisual simultaneity-judgment behavior, disorganized natural speech, and greater clinical severity. These findings suggest that distributed beta modulation may serve as a candidate cross-domain marker associated with perceptual, motor, and language disturbances in schizophrenia, motivating future studies that directly test predictive updating mechanisms.