Judgements of agency in schizophrenia: an impairment in autonoetic metacognition

Abstract

We investigated judgements of agency in participants with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Participants engaged in a computer game in which they attempted to touch downward falling Xs and avoid touching Os. On some trials, participants were objectively in perfect control. On other trials, they were objectively not in complete control because the movement of the cursor on the screen was distorted with respect to the position of the mouse by random noise (turbulence), or it was lagged by 250 or 500 ms. Participants made metacognitive judgements of agency as well as judgements of performance. Control participants' judgements of agency were affected by the turbulence and lag variables-indicating that they knew they were objectively not in control in those conditions, and they were also influenced by their assessments of performance. The patients also used their assessments of performance but neither turbulence nor lag affected their judgements of agency. This indicated an impairment in agency monitoring. The patients, unlike the healthy controls, used only publically available external cues about performance in making judgements of 'agency' and did not rely on any additional access to internal self-relevant cues that were diagnostic in indicating whether or not they were, in fact, in control.

Regional White Matter Variation Associated with Domain-specific Metacognitive Accuracy

“…This finding bolsters previous evidence for the notion that metacognitive skill in one domain may not necessarily translate to another (David et al, 2012;Metcalfe et al, 2012;Pannu & Kaszniak, 2005;Schnyer et al, 2004). Furthermore, our results indicate that metacognitive accuracy in each domain was related to regional differences of white matter microstructure.…”

“…For instance, schizophrenic patients appear to have a relatively preserved capacity to make retrospective metacognitive judgments of their memory as well as trialby-trial judgments of their performance accuracy, despite showing significant impairment in metacognitive judgments of their own agency as well as a generalized impairment in insight into their disorder (David, Bedford, Wiffen, & Gilleen, 2012;Metcalfe, Van Snellenberg, DeRosse, Balsam, & Malhotra, 2012). Furthermore, preliminary studies in healthy individuals have suggested that there may be domain specificity in the neural basis of metacognitive ability in distinct cognitive domains.…”

Variations in the sense of agency during hypnotic responding: Insights from latent profile analysis.

“…A last measure of participant classification, entropy, was calculated on the basis of each model's posterior probabilities for group membership; values range from 0 to 1 with greater values reflecting superior classification of participants (Ramaswamy, Desarbo, Reibstein, & Robinson, 1993). The LPA was performed using MPLUS v. 7.3 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2012.…”

“…This perception, referred to as the sense of agency, is impaired in a very salient manner in a number of clinical conditions including schizophrenia (Metcalfe, Van Snellenberg, DeRosse, Balsam, & Malhotra, 2012) and the dissociative disorders (Spiegel et al, 2013).…”

Autonomy and Severe Mental Illness: The Relationship between Social Network and Functioning

“…However, severe mental illness could result in considerable impairments in everyday functioning [5][6][7], and from a cognitive perspective, research has found that patients with schizophrenia have a reduced metacognitive capacity [8] as well as difficulties with metacognitive agency [9].…”