Rouy Martin, Roger Matthieu, Goueytes Dorian, Pereira Michael, Roux Paul, Faivre Nathan
Université Grenoble Alpes, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS, LPNC, 38000, Grenoble, France.
Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, Paris, France.
Schizophrenia (Heidelb). 2023 Feb 23;9(1):12. doi: 10.1038/s41537-023-00333-4.
A large number of behavioral studies suggest that confidence judgments are impaired in schizophrenia, motivating the search for neural correlates of an underlying metacognitive impairment. Electrophysiological studies suggest that a specific evoked response potential reflecting performance monitoring, namely the error-related negativity (ERN), is blunted in schizophrenia compared to healthy controls. However, attention has recently been drawn to a potential confound in the study of metacognition, namely that lower task-performance in schizophrenia compared to healthy controls involves a decreased index of metacognitive performance (where metacognitive performance is construed as the ability to calibrate one's confidence relative to response correctness), independently of metacognitive abilities among patients. Here, we assessed how this confound might also apply to ERN-blunting in schizophrenia. We used an adaptive staircase procedure to titrate task-performance on a motion discrimination task in which participants (N = 14 patients and 19 controls) had to report their confidence after each trial while we recorded high density EEG. Interestingly, not only metaperceptual abilities were preserved among patients at the behavioral level, but contrary to our hypothesis, we also found no electrophysiological evidence for altered EEG markers of performance monitoring. These results bring additional evidence suggesting an unaltered ability to monitor perceptual performance on a trial by trial basis in schizophrenia.
大量行为学研究表明，精神分裂症患者的信心判断受损，这促使人们寻找潜在元认知障碍的神经关联。电生理学研究表明，与健康对照相比，精神分裂症患者中一种反映表现监测的特定诱发电位，即错误相关负波（ERN），有所减弱。然而，最近人们的注意力被吸引到元认知研究中的一个潜在混杂因素上，即与健康对照相比，精神分裂症患者较低的任务表现涉及元认知表现指数的降低（其中元认知表现被理解为根据反应正确性校准自身信心的能力），这与患者的元认知能力无关。在此，我们评估了这种混杂因素如何也可能适用于精神分裂症患者的ERN减弱情况。我们使用了一种自适应阶梯程序来调整一项运动辨别任务中的任务表现，在该任务中，参与者（14名患者和19名对照）在每次试验后必须报告他们的信心，同时我们记录高密度脑电图。有趣的是，不仅在行为水平上患者的元感知能力得以保留，而且与我们的假设相反，我们也没有发现表现监测的脑电图标记改变的电生理学证据。这些结果带来了更多证据，表明精神分裂症患者在逐次试验基础上监测感知表现的能力未受影响。
