Related Experiment Videos
Selective speech perception alterations in schizophrenic patients reporting hallucinated "voices"
R E Hoffman1, J Rapaport, C M Mazure
1Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn., USA.
The American Journal of Psychiatry
|March 18, 1999
Summary
Hallucinated voices in schizophrenia stem from impaired speech perception and verbal working memory, not attention deficits. This study modeled disordered speech perception using computer simulations.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
- Computational modeling
Background:
- Auditory hallucinations, or
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the cognitive underpinnings of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia.
- To test a computational model simulating disordered speech perception in relation to hallucination generation.
Main Methods:
- Compared speech perception, verbal working memory, and auditory attention in patients with schizophrenia (with and without hallucinations) and healthy controls.
- Utilized masked speech tracking, sentence repetition, and auditory continuous performance tasks.
Main Results:
- Patients experiencing hallucinations showed deficits in speech perception and verbal working memory compared to non-hallucinating patients and controls.
- Both patient groups exhibited auditory attention impairments relative to controls, but did not differ from each other.
Conclusions:
- Findings support the role of disrupted speech perception and verbal working memory in the generation of auditory hallucinations.
- Results suggest that non-language cognitive deficits are less likely to explain auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia.