Cognitive Psychopathology and Neuropsychology Unit, University of Geneva, 40, Boulevard du Pont-d’Arve, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland.
Neuropsychology. 2010 Sep;24(5):608-15. doi: 10.1037/a0019113.
Recent research has revealed that schizophrenia patients are impaired in remembering the past and imagining the future. In this study, we examined patients' ability to engage in scene construction (i.e., the process of mentally generating and maintaining a complex and coherent scene), which is a key part of retrieving past experiences and episodic future thinking.
24 participants with schizophrenia and 25 healthy controls were asked to imagine new fictitious experiences and described their mental representations of the scenes in as much detail as possible. Descriptions were scored according to various dimensions (e.g., sensory details, spatial reference), and participants also provided ratings of their subjective experience when imagining the scenes (e.g., their sense of presence, the perceived similarity of imagined events to past experiences).
Imagined scenes contained less phenomenological details (d = 1.11) and were more fragmented (d = 2.81) in schizophrenia patients compared to controls. Furthermore, positive symptoms were positively correlated to the sense of presence (r = .43) and the perceived similarity of imagined events to past episodes (r = .47), whereas negative symptoms were negatively related to the overall richness of the imagined scenes (r = -.43).
The results suggest that schizophrenic patients' impairments in remembering the past and imagining the future are, at least in part, due to deficits in the process of scene construction. The relationships between the characteristics of imagined scenes and positive and negative symptoms could be related to reality monitoring deficits and difficulties in strategic retrieval processes, respectively.
最近的研究表明，精神分裂症患者在回忆过去和想象未来方面存在障碍。在这项研究中，我们考察了患者进行场景构建的能力（即心理生成和维持复杂而连贯场景的过程），这是检索过去经验和情节性未来思维的关键部分。
24 名精神分裂症患者和 25 名健康对照组被要求想象新的虚构经历，并尽可能详细地描述他们对场景的心理表象。描述根据各种维度进行评分（例如，感官细节、空间参考），参与者还对想象场景时的主观体验进行评分（例如，存在感、想象事件与过去经历的感知相似性）。
与对照组相比，精神分裂症患者想象的场景包含较少的现象学细节（d = 1.11），且更为碎片化（d = 2.81）。此外，阳性症状与存在感呈正相关（r =.43），与想象事件与过去情节的感知相似性呈正相关（r =.47），而阴性症状与想象场景的整体丰富度呈负相关（r = -.43）。
研究结果表明，精神分裂症患者在回忆过去和想象未来方面的障碍至少部分归因于场景构建过程中的缺陷。想象场景的特征与阳性和阴性症状之间的关系可能与现实监测缺陷和策略检索过程中的困难有关。
