Association-sensory spatiotemporal hierarchy and functional gradient-regularised recurrent neural network with implications for schizophrenia

The human neocortex is functionally organised at its highest level along a continuous sensory-to-association (AS) hierarchy. This study characterises the AS hierarchy of patients with schizophrenia in a comparison with controls. Using a large fMRI dataset (N=355), we extracted individual AS gradients via spectral analysis of brain connectivity, quantified hierarchical specialisation by gradient spread, and related this spread with connectivity geometry. We found that schizophrenia compresses the AS hierarchy indicating reduced functional differentiation. By modelling neural timescale with the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, we observed that the most specialised, locally cohesive regions at the gradient extremes exhibit dynamics with a longer time constant, an effect that is attenuated in schizophrenia. To study computation, we used the gradients to regularise subject-specific recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on working memory tasks. Networks endowed with greater gradient spread learned more efficiently, plateaued at lower task loss, and maintained stronger alignment to the prescribed AS hierarchical geometry. Fixed point linearisation showed that high-range networks settled into more stable neural states during memory delay, evidenced by lower energy and smaller maximal Jacobian eigenvalues. This gradient-regularised RNN framework therefore links large-scale cortical architecture with fixed point stability, providing a mechanistic account of how gradient de-differentiation could destabilise neural computations in schizophrenia, convergently supported by empirical timescale flattening and model-based evidence of less stable fixed points.