Schizophrenia patients are impaired in recognition task but more for intentionality than physical causality

Abstract

It is now largely accepted that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit to attribute mental states to others, such as intentions, needs and motivations but also to perform memory tasks. According to one hypothesis, these impairments may be due to an early visual attention deficit during the encounter of social stimuli. Another hypothesis posits a robust correlation between intention attribution and autobiographical memory that results in impaired recollection of past events making it difficult to infer others' intentions. In sum, the link between intention attribution and encoding process is yet to be explored in patients with schizophrenia. The objective of the present study is to contribute to this debate by investigating whether schizophrenic patients' recollection can be boosted by an attentional cueing on relevant information and to determine the influence of two different situational contexts: attribution of intentions or physical causality scripts. By using a supraliminal attentional cue, we made relevant areas of our material more salient across two conditions: attribution of intentions (AI) and physical causality with human characters (PCCH). The results confirmed expected deficit of explicit memory in schizophrenia patients while attentional cueing on relevant areas for intentions attribution or physical causality had no effect on recollection in any group. However, it seems that the recollection performances are highly influenced by the nature of intentions attribution. Also, it is the first time that the material used for the assessment of theory of mind performances has been tested with a recognition test.

Keywords: Autobiographical memory; Recollection; Schizophrenia; Social cognition; Theory of mind.