Dysfunctions of Spatial Cognition in Schizophrenic Patients

Abstract

Twenty outpatients who fulfilled the criteria for a diagnosis of schizophrenia and 28 control participants were invited to learn a route through a complex outdoor environment. They were then tested in tasks intended to explore various aspects of their memorized representation of the navigational episode. Compared to controls, the patients showed significant impairment in both the verbal production of route directions and the drawing of sketch maps. They referred to fewer landmarks and provided fewer directional instructions than the controls, while making a greater number of irrelevant comments. When invited to distinguish between photographs showing views of landmarks encountered along the route and distractors, they performed as well as the controls, and they had similar response times. However, when they were presented with pairs of actual photographs taken along the route, they displayed special difficulty in deciding which of the two landmarks was encountered first along the route. This difficulty in retrieving the sequential structure of the navigational episode suggests that the patients' memories were not accurately linked to one another in their mental representation of the route. These findings are interpreted in the context of current hypotheses about the hippocampal impairment that affects schizophrenic patients.

Description of Routes in People With Intellectual Disability

“…By contrast, more than half of the participants of the CA group were able to describe the route correctly in the two experiments, and 9 participants out of 17 were able to correctly draw the route on the map in Experiment 2. This proportion was not high but, as regards to route descriptions, it was comparable to those observed in experiments conducted in real environments (see Daniel et al, 2007;Denis et al, 2014). Research with adults has also shown that there are large individual differences in the microgenesis of environmental knowledge (Ishikawa & Montello, 2006).…”

“…The first and the second route descriptions were transcribed and coded as a set of minimal units of information, following the method used by Denis (1997). In the original classification, Denis and his collaborators divided the unit of information into five classes of statements (Daniel, Dibo-Cohen, Carité, Boyer, & Denis, 2007;Michon & Denis, 2001): Action prescription without referring to any landmark; action prescription referring to a landmark; reference to a landmark without referring to any associated action; descriptions of landmarks;…”

“To see or not to see: that is the question.” The “Protection-Against-Schizophrenia” (PaSZ) model: evidence from congenital blindness and visuo-cognitive aberrations

“…Their deficits include abnormal performance on delayed-response tasks (Park and Holzman, 1992; Goldman-Rakic, 1994; Glahn et al, 2003; Park et al, 2003; Saperstein et al, 2006; Genderson et al, 2007), figure search (Longevialle-Henin et al, 2005), mental rotation (de Vignemont et al, 2006; Halari et al, 2006), Gestalt perception (O'Donnell et al, 1996; Parnas et al, 2001; Cavezian et al, 2007; Kimhy et al, 2007), spatial span (Cannon et al, 2000; Perry et al, 2001; Manoach et al, 2005; Genderson et al, 2007; Thoma et al, 2007), 3-D real-world navigation Daniel et al (2007), and referencing (Landgraf et al, 2010a; Mazhari et al, 2010). According to a meta-analysis, there is an overall effect size of −1.00 regarding VS working memory deficits in chronic schizophrenia patients (Piskulic et al, 2007), and these deficits are independent of gender differences (Albus et al, 1997; Reichenberg et al, 2002; Voglmaier et al, 2005; Halari et al, 2006; Wolitzky et al, 2006).…”

Untitled

“…This, translates into a fragmented perception of the timing of events or, more specifically, a period of time divided into adjacent elements that is difficult to integrate into a unified experience that constrains (when did it occur?) as the main time interval in the conscious experience formation.The interior space was been described as a terrible emptiness that confirms it's collapsed aspect as mentioned above, thus ; reflecting a deformation and difficulty of the movement of thoughts due to the lack of the supreme coordinate "time" and because it is integrated in a spatio-temporal axis, Marie-Paule Daniel et al; affirm that « The reconstruction of the chronology of the landmarks is disrupted in schizophrenics, which confirms that the problem they are confronted with pertains to spatiotemporal coordination and affects the memory of the sequence in which landmarks have been encountered during the navigational episode.…”