Department of Psychology, Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Research Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.
Inserm U1114 - Cognitive Neuropsychology and Pathophysiology of Schizophrenia, Strasbourg, France.
Sci Rep. 2019 Sep 25;9(1):13858. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-50447-y.
People with schizophrenia experience difficulties in remembering their past and envisioning their future. However, while alterations of event representation are well documented, little is known about how personal events are located and ordered in time. Using a think-aloud procedure, we investigated which strategies are used to determine the times of past and future events in 30 patients with schizophrenia and 30 control participants. We found that the direct access to temporal information of important events was preserved in patients with schizophrenia. However, when events were not directly located in time, patients less frequently used a combination of strategies and partly relied on different strategies to reconstruct or infer the times of past and future events. In particular, they used temporal landmark events and contextual details (e.g., about places, persons, or weather conditions) less frequently than controls to locate events in time. Furthermore, patients made more errors when they were asked to determine the temporal order of the past and future events that had been previously dated. Together, these findings shed new light on the mechanisms involved in locating and ordering personal events in past and future times and their alteration in schizophrenia.
精神分裂症患者在回忆过去和想象未来方面存在困难。然而，尽管事件表象的改变已经得到充分记录，但对于个人事件在时间中的定位和排序方式知之甚少。我们采用出声思维法，调查了 30 名精神分裂症患者和 30 名对照组参与者在确定过去和未来事件时间时使用的策略。结果发现，精神分裂症患者对重要事件的直接获取时间信息的能力得以保留。然而，当事件不能直接定位在时间上时，患者较少使用组合策略，部分依赖于不同的策略来重构或推断过去和未来事件的时间。特别是，他们使用时间标志事件和上下文细节（例如，关于地点、人物或天气条件）的频率低于对照组，以在时间中定位事件。此外，当要求患者确定之前已确定日期的过去和未来事件的时间顺序时，他们会犯更多的错误。总之，这些发现为定位和排序过去和未来时间中个人事件的机制以及精神分裂症中的改变提供了新的视角。
