NCT03880227

Improving Visual Attention in Schizophrenia

Improving Visual Attention to Social Stimuli in Individuals With Schizophrenia

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 81 (actual)
• Sponsor: The University of Texas at Dallas · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 60 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

This study investigates whether visual attention can be improved in individuals with schizophrenia by stimulating the brain via transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS).

Detailed description

Individuals with schizophrenia tend to display abnormal visual attention when performing visual tasks, typically spending less time on salient features of the stimuli (e.g. core facial features or body movement in social tasks), and instead focusing on idiosyncratic features of an image or video. Poor visual attention in schizophrenia has been directly linked to poorer social cognitive performance (e.g. recognizing emotional expressions or social cues) which can impact an individual's day to day functioning. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) is a form of noninvasive neurostimulation which has been proposed as a therapeutic procedure in numerous psychiatric disorders. TDCS in schizophrenia has been demonstrated to improve a wide range of cognitive processes, and in healthy adults, tDCS has been demonstrated to improve aspects of social cognition. TDCS thus appears to be a promising therapeutic technique that may be useful for improving visual attention in patients with schizophrenia, and potentially impact social cognitive performance via an underlying mechanism tying the two. This study will compare visual performance in individuals with schizophrenia across two conditions: active anodal tDCS and sham tDCS, while also comparing between brain stimulation sites: rTPJ and dmPFC.

Conditions

• Schizophrenia
• Schizoaffective Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Active anodal tDCS	active anodal tDCS with behavioral tasks to assess visual attention
DEVICE	Sham tDCS	sham tDCS with behavioral tasks to assess visual attention

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-03-25
• Primary completion: 2020-03-04
• Completion: 2020-03-04
• First posted: 2019-03-19
• Last updated: 2021-07-13
• Results posted: 2021-07-13

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States

Regulatory

• FDA-regulated device study