Impairment of gaze-directed spatial coding in recent-onset schizophrenia

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Schizophrenia is characterized by deficits in both core cognitive functions and social cognition.
• The relationship between social cognition deficits and non-social (
• cold
• ) cognition in schizophrenia remains an area of investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether social cognition deficits influence non-social cognition in patients with recent-onset schizophrenia.
• To examine the impact of social cues on cognitive performance using a Simon task.

Main Methods:

• Thirty-five patients with recent-onset schizophrenia (SC) and 30 healthy controls (HC) completed a Simon task.
• The task involved social cues (schematic eyes) and nonsocial cues (rectangles) to assess the Simon effect.
• Reaction times were measured to analyze differences in the Simon effect between groups and cue types.

Main Results:

• Patients with schizophrenia exhibited longer reaction times overall compared to healthy controls.
• The Simon effect was significantly stronger in healthy controls than in schizophrenia patients when presented with eye-like social cues.
• Healthy controls showed a stronger Simon effect with social cues compared to nonsocial cues, while patients did not exhibit this difference, indicating reduced influence of social cues.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that the processing of social cues, particularly gaze, is altered in schizophrenia patients, even when task-irrelevant.
• Deficits in social cognition appear to influence non-social cognitive processing in schizophrenia.
• Psychopathology or antipsychotic treatment did not significantly affect the observed results.