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Query: UMLS:C0036341 (schizophrenia)
 60,220 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Varying degrees of organization of verbal material were presented to determine their use in sentence reproduction by acute and chronic schizophrenic subjects, a psychiatric (alcoholic) control group, and a healthy control group. The material consisted of six-word sentences presented over earphones, with background noise of differing intensity. The main result was that schizophrenics use verbal organization as effectively as healthy and psychiatric controls when reproducing the sentences. The noise distraction influenced performance of all groups similarly. Results suggest that performance of schizophrenics is facilitated by structured material (semantic and syntactic organization). The results do not suggest that either the linguistic repertoire or the application of linguistic rules is specifically affected in schizophrenia. The flatter performance slope of schizophrenics with increasing contexual constraints, found by some researchers, is explained by the unspecific effect of task difficulty.
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PMID:Do schizophrenics use linguistic rules in speech recall? 39 53

To examine the nature of impaired smooth pursuit eye movement (SPEM) in schizophrenia, 16 hospitalized schizophrenics in the acute phase and 16 hospitalized nonpsychotic patients were studied. The experiment consisted of five 30-sec visual tracking phases: (i) base line (no distraction); (ii) auditory-visual distraction; (iii) middle base line; (iv) dichotic listening; and (v) final base line. Schizophrenics were characterized by significantly more velocity arrests throughout all phases of the experiment. Auditory-visual distraction did not impair either group's SPEM relative to base line performance. In contrast, dichotic listening significantly increased both groups' velocity arrests. This form of distraction also tended to produce greater impairment among schizophrenics. The failure of apparently intense auditory-visual distraction to significantly disrupt schizophrenics' SPEM suggests that inattentiveness alone does not account for schizophrenics' tracking impairment. This notion is supported by the finding that only the more intense distraction by dichotic listening produced a (trend toward) greater impairment in schizophrenics.
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PMID:The effect of distraction on acute schizophrenics' visual tracking. 72 10

The performance of 20 acute schizophrenics and 10 depressives, matched for age, verbal intelligence, and pre-morbid functioning, was assessed on a choice reaction-time card-sorting task. Stimulus and response uncertainty were varied independently, and there were two main conditions, distraction and no distraction. The schizophrenics were slower than the depressives over all the functions examined in the study. Schizophrenics were significantly more affected by increases in response uncertainty than the depressives. Although there was a tendency for the schizophrenic group to be more affected by distraction and by increasing stimulus uncertainty, these differences were not significant. There was no significant interaction between the effects of stimulus and response uncertainty, nor between the effects of distraction and stimulus uncertainty. The effects of distraction increased with increasing response uncertainty. The results are discussed in relation to two models of information processing, suggested by Broadbent (1971) and by Sternberg (1969). Such models allow a more detailed examination of the cognitive abnormalities found in schizophrenia.
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PMID:Attention and information processing in schizophrenia. 93 24

In order to examine the effects of irrelevant distracting information on speech disorder, medicated (n = 13) and unmedicated (n = 18) schizophrenics were compared to a mixed affective sample (n = 15) on the frequencies of linguistic measures of verbal communication disorder. Patients conversed with an interviewer during the presence and absence of irrelevant information inserted into their conversation. Affective patients manifested no distraction-related increase in communication disorder. Schizophrenics on medication manifested a small, but nonsignificant, increase in communication disorders during the concurrent distraction condition. Unmedicated schizophrenics manifested a substantial increase in their communication disorders during distraction. These data suggest that medication reduces the extent to which speech processes in schizophrenia are vulnerable to overload-related deterioration and provide confirmation of the hypothesis that some component of positive thought disorder in schizophrenia is due to medication-responsive attention deficits.
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PMID:Effect of concurrent distraction on communication failures in schizophrenic patients. II. Medication status correlations. 168 91

The Continuous Performance Test-Identical Pairs version was administered to 14 schizophrenic patients, 17 depressed patients, and 28 normal controls. The task was divided into verbal and spatial stimuli, as well as no-distraction and distraction (verbal and auditory) conditions. Both patient groups displayed attentional impairments compared to normal subjects, but they differed from each other in specific profiles. Schizophrenic patients were characterized by a global impairment and a particular inability to focus on the critical stimuli, whether verbal or spatial. They also made an excess of random responses throughout the task but showed no evidence that attention declined from its initial level over time. Depressed patients did not display a global attentional deficit but did show a specific inability to attend to spatial as compared to verbal stimuli and, in particular, a confusion when the spatial stimuli were only slightly different. Performance on a secondary task in response to a change in expectation improved dramatically for depressed but not schizophrenic patients, suggesting a more efficient allocation strategy, a greater reserve of processing capacity, or more dependence on motivational factors in depressed patients. Schizophrenic and depressed patients were alike in extent of distractibility. Whereas normal controls improved with the onset of external distraction, schizophrenic and depressed patients deteriorated to an equal extent. Distractibility was thus concluded to be a correlate of acute psychiatric illness and not specific for schizophrenia.
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PMID:The continuous performance test, identical pairs version: II. Contrasting attentional profiles in schizophrenic and depressed patients. 277 99

Thirty families, consisting of two parents and two adolescent children, were tested on a high-processing load Continuous Performance Test, the CPT-IP, which required identification of identical stimulus pairs within a continuously presented series of stimuli. The purpose of this study was to provide normative data for research concerned with the role of attention in psychopathology, especially schizophrenia and major affective disorder. Retest data collected from 23 of the 30 families showed the CPT-IP to be a reliable measure of attention. A major developmental effect was found in capacity to sustain attention to spatial vs. verbal stimuli, which suggested that spatial skills are most developed during childhood and adolescence, while verbal attentional skills tend to peak in adulthood. Factor analysis and family transmission patterns further suggested that the two types of attention (spatial and verbal) were independent and that each was heritable to some degree. Experimental distraction did not disrupt performance in any of the subjects and, in fact, tended to improve it in the adolescents, especially for spatial stimuli. We conclude that the CPT-IP is appropriate for use with families containing members differing widely in age and processing skills.
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PMID:The Continuous Performance Test, identical pairs version (CPT-IP): I. New findings about sustained attention in normal families. 323 15

Attentional impairment has been hypothesized to be associated with negative symptoms in schizophrenia. The present study examined the relation between attentional performance and positive and negative symptoms in both schizophrenic and manic patients. The results showed that deficits on the distraction conditions of a digit-span task were greatest in positive-symptom schizophrenics. Regression analyses revealed that only certain positive symptoms were related to digit-span scores; specifically, ratings of positive-thought disorder were inversely associated with performance for both schizophrenics and manics. The findings are discussed in light of their implications for conceptualizing the symptom categories and their laboratory correlates.
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PMID:Positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenia: attentional performance correlates. 361 84

Manic (N = 18) and schizophrenic (N = 23) patients were evaluated with a linguistic assessment of reference failures and were tested with a digit span distraction task. It was found that, although manics and schizophrenics did not differ in their distraction performance, there were differential relationships between task performance and reference performance across the two subject samples. Both distraction and nondistraction performances were related equally to discourse failures in manics while distraction performance was a much better predictor of discourse failure than nondistraction performance in the schizophrenic sample. The fact that susceptibility to the effects of distraction seemed to be an important and specific predictor of discourse failures in schizophrenia is discussed in terms of recent developments in research and theory regarding schizophrenic speech disorders.
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PMID:Distractibility and discourse failure. Their association in mania and schizophrenia. 370 15

The occurrance of interference as a basic disturbance in sensory input and information processing in schizophrenic patients is explained both by means of a theoretical model implying a deficit in filtering, as well as describing a time delay in the information processing. Such basic disturbances seem to be at least partly, due to short-term memory processing when it is considering that this kind of storage represents a main function of the information processing system. The results presented here, indicate that schizophrenic patients show disturbances in various memory functions, in relationship to their subjective awareness of these disturbances. Immediate memorizing is a task that is particularly affected here, especially when examined under non-artificial, that is, everyday conditions requiring the simultaneous solving of a variety of tasks and entailing a disruption in attention. Schizophrenics were found to deviate highly significantly from nonschizophrenics regarding their ability to retain short-term material. The main cause for these results is their low resistance towards distraction, and the potential to be disturbed through interference. The question that arises here is: how the main schizophrenic symptom, known as thought disorder, can be explained by the handicap of a short-term memory, and not neglect the possible importance of the correlation with other psychic functions such as attention and concentration. The pathological significance of a malfunctioning memory can be illustrated by the significant correlations seen between immediate memory and the prognosis of the disease schizophrenia.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
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PMID:[Significance of information processing systems for schizophrenic diseases, exemplified by deficient memory functions]. 379 9

Two tasks designed to measure selective attention were administered to schizophrenics, patients with bipolar disorder, and normal subjects. Schizophrenics were divided into three subgroups: positive-, negative-, and mixed-symptom patients. Positive-symptom schizophrenics showed significant deficits on a digit-span task when compared to normal subjects. Furthermore, the positive group was the only one to show a significant performance decrement in the distraction condition of the digit-span task. There were no significant group differences in performance on a dichotic listening test. The results of the present study are contrary to the hypothesis that selective attention deficits are characteristic of negative-symptom schizophrenia. Instead, the findings suggest that positive symptoms are associated with greater susceptibility to distraction.
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PMID:Attentional performance in positive- and negative-symptom schizophrenia. 395 1


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