Inferential-Reasoning Impairment in Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

The performance of 15 participants with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SCZ) on an inferential-reasoning task was compared with that of 15 healthy-control participants (HC). The SCZ group showed poorer inferential reasoning than HCs, independent of their negative or positive symptoms. These findings are consistent with previous research showing deficits of reasoning in schizophrenia, and indicate that this deficit is independent of severity of delusions.

Neural correlates of dynamic emotion perception in schizophrenia and the influence of prior expectations

“…Therefore, the congruent condition in our task requires processes such as reasoning and associative learning, that reinforce prior expectations. These processes have been found to be impaired in patients with schizophrenia in previous literature (Diwadkar et al, 2008;Dudley et al, 2016;Green et al, 2004;Kruck et al, 2011). Our findings also support those of Chambon and colleagues (2011) who found that during dynamic social perception SCZ patients have less facilitation of performance by prior expectations.…”

Neural basis of altered physical and social causality judgements in schizophrenia

“…These behavioural differences correspond with findings of impaired causal inferences in SZ in other cognitive domains, e.g. reasoning biases (see e.g., Kruck et al, 2011), and mental state-inferences (see e.g., Horan et al, 2009). The current results extend this body of evidence to the domain of causal judgements on motion events, indicating similar inference biases for physical/social events in SZ.…”

“…At the level of cognition, deviant causal inferences occur in biased (Moritz and Woodward, 2005) and impaired reasoning (Kruck et al, 2011), as well as altered inferences about other people's mental states and social interactions (Horan et al, 2009;Herrington et al, 2011). At the level of perception, psychotic patients might also experience cause and effect differently: for instance, positive symptoms of psychosis (delusions) are associated with increased impressions of physical causality in visual events (Tschacher and Kupper, 2006).…”

The role of Precise and Imprecise Syllogisms in the di-agnosis of reasoning deficits in mental disorders

“…Their position is that depression, frequently associated with schizophrenia, provokes a lack of motivation that influences the abnormal resolution of logical tasks. Kruck et al [20], in return, noted findings consistent with those obtained by the previous research, corroborating that patients with schizophrenia disorders have greater deficits that healthy-control patients regarding logic reasoning.…”