Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Psychology, Berlin, Germany.
World J Biol Psychiatry. 2011 Dec;12(8):608-19. doi: 10.3109/15622975.2010.544329. Epub 2011 Feb 2.
Cognitive deficits are of fundamental importance to the clinical picture of schizophrenia and are on the verge to be included as diagnostic criteria in the DSM-V. While focusing on information processing deficits, no emphasis has been put on whether patients' deficits can be accounted for by maladaptive information acquisition strategy deployment.
We tested 24 stabilized patients with schizophrenia and 25 matched controls in a visuo-spatial analogy task with graded difficulty. Eye movement recordings served to identify information acquisition strategies.
Patients compared to healthy controls showed slower reaction times in the easiest condition and higher error rates in the more difficult conditions. Eye movement recordings illustrated that overall mean fixation duration increased with increasing task difficulty in healthy controls only. Further, patients deployed a more efficient strategy ("constructive matching") less often than healthy controls in the easier conditions.
These results suggest that information acquisition strategies mediate visuo-spatial cognitive performance in schizophrenia. Patients adopt a less efficient strategy independently of task difficulty indicated by a characteristic behavioural pattern. Our results point to a powerful tool of improving patients' performance in cognitively demanding tasks by training them in more flexible cognitive (e.g., information acquisition) strategy deployment.
认知缺陷是精神分裂症临床特征的重要基础，并且即将被纳入 DSM-V 的诊断标准。虽然研究重点是信息处理缺陷，但并未强调患者的缺陷是否可以归因于适应性信息获取策略的部署。
我们在一项具有不同难度等级的视觉空间类比任务中，对 24 名稳定期精神分裂症患者和 25 名匹配的对照组进行了测试。眼动记录用于确定信息获取策略。
与健康对照组相比，患者在最简单的条件下反应时间较慢，在更困难的条件下错误率更高。眼动记录表明，只有在健康对照组中，随着任务难度的增加，平均注视持续时间才会增加。此外，患者在较简单的条件下比健康对照组更少采用更有效的策略（“建设性匹配”）。
这些结果表明，信息获取策略在精神分裂症的视觉空间认知表现中起中介作用。患者表现出一种不太有效的策略，这种策略不受任务难度的影响，这表明患者的行为模式具有特征性。我们的结果表明，通过训练患者更灵活地（例如，通过信息获取）部署认知策略，可以提高他们在认知要求高的任务中的表现，这是一种非常有效的工具。
