4 research outputs found

    Confusion between silent and overt reading in schizophrenia

    No full text
    The present study was aimed at investigating whether schizophrenic patients are impaired in monitoring their own speech. In particular, we attempted to assess their ability to discriminate between overt and covert speech in a reading task, in order to verify whether they can correctly recollect the modality in which an internally generated action is produced. Subjects were asked to read either silently or aloud, items from a list of words. After a delay of 5 min, they were required to indicate in a new list which words had been read previously (either silently or overtly), or had never been presented during the reading task. With respect to normal controls, schizophrenic patients showed a significant bias to report that they had read aloud words which they had actually read silently, or which were absent during the reading task. The results are discussed in relation to recent neuroimaging studies on inner and overt speech in hallucinating schizophrenic patients. Our data favour the hypothesis that the inability to correctly discriminate between inner and overt speech may play a role in the onset of schizophrenic hallucinations

    Gaze discrimination is unimpaired in schizophrenia

    No full text
    Interpersonal communication is largely dependent on interpretation of facial expression and emotion. Difficulties in face processing, and more specifically in gaze discrimination, have been described in schizophrenic patients. According to Baron-Cohen (Mindblindness. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995), gaze discrimination relies on the functioning of a specific cognitive module, the Eye Direction Detector (EDD). It has been proposed [Rosse et al. (1994) Gaze discrimination in patients with schizophrenia: preliminary report. American Journal of Psychiatry 151, 919-921] that an impairment in gaze discrimination is present in schizophrenia, and plays a fundamental role in inducing the paranoid symptoms reported by many patients. However, in the previous studies, gaze direction detection and interpretation of gaze have never been completely dissociated. The present experiment attempts to test the schizophrenics' skill in a simple gaze direction detection task. A series of photographic portraits of models looking at different directions have been presented to 22 schizophrenic patients and 36 control subjects. For each portrait subjects were asked to determine whether gaze was directed to the right or to the left by pressing a keyboard key. A forced choice paradigm was used. No differences were reported between schizophrenic patients and control subjects. That is, in the present paradigm, schizophrenic patients did not show any specific impairment in detecting the direction of gaze of the portraits. The results are discussed according to the notion that a dissociation is present in schizophrenia between implicit and explicit processes. The present case illustrates how the more automatic elementary functions, such as the detection of gaze direction, may be spared in schizophrenic patients, whereas explicit cognitive functions are likely more affected
    corecore