Neuroimaging Center, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen.
University Center of Psychiatry, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2016 Jan;125(1):88-103. doi: 10.1037/abn0000123. Epub 2015 Nov 16.
Schizophrenia is thought to be associated with impairments of executive functions, among which conflict control functions play an important role. The available evidence, however, suggests that conflict control is intact in schizophrenia, despite being based on methods that have successfully unveiled conflict control problems in other disorders. Differences between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls in stimulus perception, selective attention, alertness, processing speed and reaction time variability may have been previously overlooked. By controlling for these potential confounders, the present experiments were aimed to be more rigorous tests of the hypothesis that psychosis and schizophrenia are associated with impairments of conflict control. To that end, 27 healthy controls and 53 recent-onset psychosis patients with (n = 27) and without schizophrenia (n = 26) with comparable age, intelligence, and education level, performed three iconic conflict control tasks: the Simon task, the Eriksen flanker task, and the Stroop task, all equipped with neutral trials, and analyzed for various potential confounders. They further performed a battery of standard neuropsychological tests. Schizophrenia patients showed no increased conflict effects in any of the 3 tasks for any alternative measures used. Nonschizophrenia patients only showed abnormally increased response competition in the Simon task. All patients nevertheless demonstrated impaired control of attention and verbal memory. These findings indicate that the type of conflict control engaged by conflict tasks is intact in recent-onset schizophrenia, suggesting that a major component of executive function is spared in schizophrenia. We discuss these findings in terms of proactive and reactive control.
精神分裂症被认为与执行功能障碍有关，其中冲突控制功能起着重要作用。然而，现有证据表明，尽管基于的方法已成功揭示了其他障碍中的冲突控制问题，但精神分裂症患者的冲突控制是完整的。精神分裂症患者与健康对照组在刺激感知、选择性注意、警觉性、加工速度和反应时变异性方面的差异可能以前被忽视了。通过控制这些潜在的混杂因素，本实验旨在更严格地检验精神分裂症与冲突控制障碍有关的假设。为此，27 名健康对照者和 53 名近期发病的精神病患者（有精神分裂症[n=27]和无精神分裂症[n=26]），年龄、智力和教育程度相当，进行了三项标志性的冲突控制任务：Simon 任务、Eriksen 侧翼任务和 Stroop 任务，所有任务都配备了中性试验，并分析了各种潜在的混杂因素。他们进一步进行了一系列标准神经心理学测试。在任何替代测量中，精神分裂症患者在这 3 项任务中都没有表现出增加的冲突效应。非精神分裂症患者仅在 Simon 任务中表现出异常增加的反应竞争。然而，所有患者的注意力和言语记忆控制都受损。这些发现表明，冲突任务所涉及的冲突控制类型在近期发病的精神分裂症中是完整的，这表明执行功能的一个主要组成部分在精神分裂症中得到了保留。我们根据主动和被动控制来讨论这些发现。
