Carroll Christine A, O'Donnell Brian F, Shekhar Anantha, Hetrick William P
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Brain Cogn. 2009 Dec;71(3):345-53. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2009.06.009. Epub 2009 Aug 6.
Schizophrenia may be associated with a fundamental disturbance in the temporal coordination of information processing in the brain, leading to classic symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder and disorganized and contextually inappropriate behavior. Although a variety of behavioral studies have provided strong evidence for perceptual timing deficits in schizophrenia, no study to date has directly examined overt temporal performance in schizophrenia using a task that differentially engages perceptual and motor-based timing processes. The present study aimed to isolate perceptual and motor-based temporal performance in individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia using a repetitive finger-tapping task that has previously been shown to differentially engage brain regions associated with perceptual and motor-related timing behavior. Thirty-two individuals with schizophrenia and 31 non-psychiatric control participants completed the repetitive finger-tapping task, which required participants to first tap in time with computer-generated tones separated by a fixed intertone interval (tone-paced tapping), after which the tones were discontinued and participants were required to continue tapping at the established pace (self-paced tapping). Participants with schizophrenia displayed significantly faster tapping rates for both tone- and self-paced portions of the task compared to the non-psychiatric group. Individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia also displayed greater tapping variability during both tone- and self-paced portions of the task. The application of a mathematical timing model further indicated that group differences were primarily attributable to increased timing--as opposed to task implementation--difficulties in the schizophrenia group, which is noteworthy given the broad range of impairments typically associated with the disorder. These findings support the contention that schizophrenia is associated with a broad range of timing difficulties, including those associated with time perception as well as time production.
精神分裂症可能与大脑中信息处理的时间协调方面的根本性紊乱有关，从而导致精神分裂症的典型症状，如思维紊乱、行为紊乱以及与情境不符的行为。尽管各种行为研究已经为精神分裂症患者存在感知时间缺陷提供了有力证据，但迄今为止，尚无研究使用能够区分感知性和基于运动的时间处理过程的任务，直接考察精神分裂症患者的明显时间表现。本研究旨在通过一项重复性手指敲击任务，区分被诊断为精神分裂症的个体基于感知和运动的时间表现，该任务先前已被证明能够区分与感知和运动相关的时间行为的大脑区域。32名精神分裂症患者和31名非精神疾病对照参与者完成了重复性手指敲击任务，该任务要求参与者首先跟随由固定的音调间隔分开的计算机生成的音调同步敲击（音调同步敲击），之后音调停止，参与者被要求继续以既定的节奏敲击（自主节奏敲击）。与非精神疾病组相比，精神分裂症患者在任务的音调同步和自主节奏部分均表现出明显更快的敲击速度。被诊断为精神分裂症的个体在任务的音调同步和自主节奏部分也表现出更大的敲击变异性。应用数学时间模型进一步表明，组间差异主要归因于精神分裂症组时间处理困难的增加——而非任务执行困难——鉴于通常与该疾病相关的广泛损伤，这一点值得注意。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即精神分裂症与广泛的时间处理困难有关，包括与时间感知以及时间生成相关的困难。
