Corollary Discharge Mechanisms in Schizophrenia

Corollary discharge refers to an internal neural signal that predicts the sensory consequences of one’s own actions. In healthy individuals, this mechanism suppresses responses to self‐generated stimuli, thereby supporting a coherent sense of agency and accurate sensory perception. In schizophrenia, corollary discharge mechanisms are compromised across auditory, somatosensory and motor domains. Patients frequently misattribute self‐produced thoughts or sounds to external sources, leading to auditory hallucinations or delusions of control. Neurophysiological studies reveal diminished suppression of sensory cortex responses during vocalisation or movement, while neuroanatomical investigations point to disrupted connectivity between motor regions, thalamic nuclei and sensory cortices. Computational and animal models have further elucidated how temporal delays, noisy motor‐to‐sensory transformations and synaptic dysconnectivity may underlie these deficits. Understanding corollary discharge dysfunction is now recognised as crucial for developing biomarkers of early psychosis and for guiding novel interventions aimed at restoring predictive signalling and ameliorating core symptoms.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies in a genetic mouse model of schizophrenia risk have demonstrated that auditory cortical neurons fail to attenuate their activity during self‐generated sounds. In mice carrying a 22q11.2 microdeletion analogue, motor‐related inputs to auditory cortex are weakened and fewer in number, providing an anatomical substrate for deficient sensory suppression. These findings recapitulate human observations of corollary discharge failure in schizophrenia and offer direct evidence that a major genetic risk factor impairs top‐down modulation of sensory cortex. The work establishes a bridge between genetic vulnerability, circuit‐level dysfunction and behavioural abnormalities in agency.

Corollary Discharge Mechanisms in Schizophrenia publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in corollary discharge mechanisms in schizophrenia across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Corollary discharge: A copy of a motor command sent to sensory areas to anticipate and suppress the neural response to self‐generated stimuli.

Efference copy: A neural duplicate of the actual motor command used by the brain to predict sensory consequences of movement.

Sense of agency: The subjective experience of controlling one’s own actions and their effects on the environment.

Motor-to-sensory transformation: The neural process by which motor signals are converted into predictive signals that inform sensory regions.

Theta intertrial coherence: A measure of consistency in the phase of theta-band oscillations across trials, indicative of temporal alignment in neural responses.

References

1. Altered corollary discharge signaling in the auditory cortex of a mouse model of schizophrenia predisposition. Nature Communications (2023).
2. Impaired motor-to-sensory transformation mediates auditory hallucinations. PLOS Biology (2024).
3. Aberrant sense of agency induced by delayed prediction signals in schizophrenia: a computational modeling study. Schizophrenia (2023).
4. Theta Phase Synchrony Is Sensitive to Corollary Discharge Abnormalities in Early Illness Schizophrenia but Not in the Psychosis Risk Syndrome. Schizophrenia Bulletin (2020).