Abstract
<p>Schizophrenia is characterized by altered social cognition and impaired social functioning. Past neuroimaging studies have examined specific aspects of social processing using various simplified tasks. However, little is known about how individuals with schizophrenia (SZs) process social stimuli under conditions that approximate the real world. In this study, we employed a naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm, in which SZs and healthy controls (HCs) freely viewed videos rich in social content. We analyzed the resulting fMRI data using intersubject correlation (ISC) methods to investigate altered processing of these naturalistic social stimuli in SZs. We found significant differences between SZs and HCs in the way video stimuli were processed within the default mode network (DMN). In addition, neural responses in SZs tended to be idiosyncratic (i.e., dissimilar to those of HCs and to those of other SZs), suggesting that processing of real-world social stimuli may be particularly heterogeneous in schizophrenia. Follow-up whole-brain analyses showed that the heterogeneity in processing for SZs extended well beyond the DMN to areas within the limbic and frontoparietal control networks. Taken together, these findings indicate that neural responses to naturalistic social stimuli, across the DMN and various other regions, tend to be more unique to each participant among SZs. Having unique experiences of the social world may contribute to challenges in navigating social situations and could thus help to explain deficits in social functioning prevalent in schizophrenia.</p>