van't Wout Mascha, Aleman André, Kessels Roy P C, Kahn René S
Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University and University Medical Center, The Netherlands.
Cogn Neuropsychiatry. 2006 May;11(3):272-84. doi: 10.1080/13546800500214041.
Monitoring environmental stimuli for their emotional relevance is inherently associated with spatial processing. In schizophrenia, deficits in spatial working memory on one hand, and abnormal emotion processing on the other, have been documented, but these have not been related to each other. In the present study, we investigated whether a specific aspect of spatial memory (i.e., object-location memory), is impaired in patients with schizophrenia. Moreover, we hypothesised that symbolic threatening content of objects would interfere with spatial processing in patients with schizophrenia but not in healthy controls.
Spatial memory for symbolic pictorial stimuli was assessed in 40 patients with schizophrenia compared to 41 healthy matched control participants using an object-relocation task.
Patients with schizophrenia performed worse in relocating objects, independent of overall intellectual ability. More specifically, patients were particularly worse in the relocation of objects with a symbolic threatening content.
These results suggest that a threatening semantic emotional content of schematic stimuli can interfere with spatial processing in schizophrenia. We hypothesise that a disproportional influence of the amygdala on other brain areas, such as the hippocampus, might underlie this specific emotional interference.
监测环境刺激的情感相关性本质上与空间处理相关。在精神分裂症中，一方面存在空间工作记忆缺陷，另一方面存在异常的情感处理，但这些尚未相互关联。在本研究中，我们调查了精神分裂症患者的空间记忆的一个特定方面（即物体位置记忆）是否受损。此外，我们假设物体的象征性威胁内容会干扰精神分裂症患者的空间处理，但不会干扰健康对照者。
使用物体重新定位任务，对40名精神分裂症患者和41名健康匹配对照参与者进行了象征性图片刺激的空间记忆评估。
精神分裂症患者在重新定位物体方面表现更差，与整体智力能力无关。更具体地说，患者在重新定位具有象征性威胁内容的物体方面尤其差。
这些结果表明，示意性刺激的威胁性语义情感内容会干扰精神分裂症患者的空间处理。我们假设杏仁核对其他脑区（如海马体）的不成比例影响可能是这种特定情感干扰的基础。
