Goal Planning in Psychosis

People with schizophrenia often struggle to make even simple plans—deciding what to cook for dinner or how to get to an appointment can become overwhelming. This research team will use brain scans and AI language models to pinpoint exactly what goes wrong in the prefrontal cortex when people with psychosis try to plan ahead. Current treatments for schizophrenia largely target hallucinations and delusions, but the cognitive problems—especially in planning and abstract thinking—are what most prevent people from living independently or holding down a job. The team does not yet know whether these planning failures stem from a single brain-circuit glitch or from a breakdown in how different regions communicate. By having volunteers perform planning tasks inside an fMRI scanner and analysing their spoken descriptions with large language models, the researchers aim to map the neural signature of impaired goal-directed thinking. This is fundamental science with no immediate clinical tool to offer. But understanding the precise neural basis of planning deficits could eventually guide the development of cognitive training therapies or brain-stimulation protocols that target the right circuits. Similar mapping of brain function in other disorders has already led to targeted treatments for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.