Neural Primacy of the Salience Processing System in Schizophrenia

For effective information processing, two large-scale distributed neural networks appear to be critical: a multimodal executive system anchored on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and a salience system anchored on the anterior insula. Aberrant interaction among distributed networks is a feature of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. We used whole-brain Granger causal modeling using resting fMRI and observed a significant failure of both the feedforward and reciprocal influence between the insula and the DLPFC in schizophrenia. Further, a significant failure of directed influence from bilateral visual cortices to the insula was also seen in patients. These findings provide compelling evidence for a breakdown of the salience-execution loop in the clinical expression of psychosis. In addition, this offers a parsimonious explanation for the often-observed “frontal inefficiency,” the failure to recruit prefrontal system when salient or novel information becomes available in patients with schizophrenia. •A salience-executive loop emerges on fMRI whole-brain Granger causal analysis•At rest, DLPFC has inhibitory Granger influence on the salience network•In schizophrenia, the salience-executive interaction is diminished•Visual cortex fails to influence the salience network in schizophrenia Palaniyappan et al. show that in patients with schizophrenia, a reciprocal salience-execution loop involving anterior insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex disintegrates along with a failure of hierarchical influence from sensory regions to the salience processing system.