Altered fMRI-based activation of prefrontal-parietal circuitry during working memory, the cognitive process to maintain and manipulate information for a short period of time, has been consistently reported in patients with schizophrenia. For the most part, unaffected relatives of patients with schizophrenia show qualitatively similar abnormal engagement of prefrontal cortex (PFC), thalamus, hippocampus-parahippocampus formation (HF) and inferior parietal lobule – especially in the right hemisphere [14, 16, 17–20 ··] (Supplementary Table 1.A). Activation of these regions and of the circuit involving them has been studied using the “imaging genetic” approach for several putative schizophrenia associated genes [8–11, 21–34, 30 ··] (Supplementary Table 2.A). Interestingly, the first GWA positive gene, ZNF804A, has not shown association with this phenotype per se [10] (but see below).
