It was originallythought that psychosis was the main consequence of aberrant salience, howeverrecent discoveries have reported that negative symptoms may arise due to theoverstimulation of irrelevant stimuli. Taking this into account, research intonon-medicated patients using fMRI scans of the brain found that reducedactivation in the ventral-striatal caused individuals to respond to irrelevantstimuli, leading to both high risk psychosis, and negative symptoms. This suggeststhat individuals may become less interested in relevant stimuli over time dueto interference in the processing of the reward system in the ventral striatum(Juckel et al.
, 2006). Therefore, the literature indicates that aberrantsalience contributes to the presence of both positive and negative symptoms inschizophrenics.
