Effects of ketamine on the perception of facial motion
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the effects of ketamine on the perception of facial motion. As facial motion contains an extensive amount of social information about emotions and intentions of an individual, being able to process these facial expressions is crucial for one’s ability to interact socially (Dobs et al., 2018; Frith, 2009; Haxby et al., 2000). Previous studies showed that processing moving faces involves neural activity in the posterior part of the superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), a brain region associated with the processing of actions of moving faces and bodies, including eye gaze, audio-visual integration of speech, emotional expressions or intentions (Pitcher & Ungerleider, 2021; Schultz et al., 2013). Individuals suffering from psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia have impaired social perception and cognition (Green et al., 2015), which could be linked to their social withdrawal (Chen & Ekstrom, 2016; Insel, 2010). As a psychotomimetic dose of the glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist ketamine can evoke psychosis-like states in healthy individuals (Krytsal et al., 1994), it is nowadays used as an experimental model of cognitive disturbances occurring in schizophrenia. Ketamine also impairs face processing: it reduces identification of the facial expression of sadness (independently of psychotic symptoms and selective attention (Ebert et al., 2012)), disrupts marmosets’ scan paths during viewing of conspecific faces (Selvanayagam et al., 2021), decreases recognition of fearful and happy faces and reduces electrophysiological responses they evoked (N170)(Schmidt et al., 2013), and alters the BOLD response evoked by fearful faces (Abel et al., 2003). We use a psychotomimetic dose of ketamine to investigate how cortical responses to facial motion, especially in the STS, are affected during a psychosis-like state. Specifically, we address this question by administering either ketamine or a saline solution to healthy participants during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a modified version of a previously used face processing task (Schultz et al., 2013).
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