Aberrant judgmental pattern of schizophrenic patients in weight discrimination

Sixteen chronic schizophrenics and 16 normal controls were tested on a weight discrimination task in various categories and hand conditions. Schizophrenics made significantly more errors than normals when the 'equal' category was included, whereas schizophrenics' performance could approximate the normals' discriminations when the 'equal' category was excluded. In the former condition, the more inaccurate performance of schizophrenics was ascribed to the selective increase in the errors by the 'equal' judgments, which was not due to an increase in 'doubtful' judgments. These findings were assumed to reflect schizophrenics' preference to equal judgments, which seemed to be their fundamental cognitive attitude, because the same tendency was found on the various discrimination tasks of other sensory modalities. Furthermore, the present results supported neither left hemisphere dysfunction nor interhemispheric transfer deficit in schizophrenia, because schizophrenics failed to show consistently more errors in the right hand and the bimanual conditions.