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Increased semantic and repetition priming in schizophrenic patients
1Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
|March 23, 2001
Summary
Schizophrenia patients show enhanced positive priming (PP) due to reliance on automatic processing, unlike controls. Negative priming (NP) was only significant for word repetition in both groups.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Schizophrenia is associated with cognitive deficits, including impaired processing.
- Priming effects, both positive and negative, offer insights into cognitive mechanisms.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate positive and negative priming (PP and NP) in schizophrenia using a lexical-decision task.
- To explore the role of automatic versus controlled processes in priming within this population.
Main Methods:
- A lexical-decision task was employed with prime-probe word stimuli.
- Probe words were presented 800 ms after prime response, varying in identity, semantic relation, or unrelatedness.
- Schizophrenia patients and control groups were compared on priming effects.
Main Results:
- Schizophrenia patients exhibited significantly stronger semantic and repetition positive priming (PP) compared to controls, even after accounting for response speed.
- Negative priming (NP) was only significant for word repetition in both patient and control groups.
- Observed PP effects in schizophrenia differed from findings in studies without response-related intervals.
Conclusions:
- Schizophrenia patients may benefit from or rely on automatic retrieval of processing episodes, particularly those involving response information, due to impaired controlled response selection.
- These findings suggest a potential automatic response facilitation mechanism in schizophrenia.