McHugo M, Talati P, Armstrong K, et al. - Given the hyperactivity of the anterior hippocampus and its reduced task-related recruitment in schizophrenia, researchers examined if hyperactivity impairs recruitment of the anterior hippocampus during scene processing. Using a block-design 1-back scene-processing task, they analyzed functional MRI data from 45 early-psychosis patients and 35 demographically matched healthy control individuals. Measurement of hippocampal activation in response to scenes and faces compared with scrambled images was done. Further they measured baseline hippocampal activity using cerebral blood volume (CBV) mapping in a subset of 20 early-psychosis patients and 31 healthy control individuals. The outcomes revealed a significant reduction in activation of the anterior hippocampus and significantly increase in CBV in the anterior hippocampus in the early stages of psychosis. They observed an inverse association of increased CBV in early-psychosis patients with task-related activation during scene processing in the anterior hippocampus. These findings suggest that during task performance, anterior hippocampal hyperactivity in early-psychosis patients limits effective recruitment of this region, thereby providing novel support for the anterior hippocampus as a therapeutic target in the treatment of cognitive deficits in psychosis.