The effects of cognitive complexity on a social sequencing task in schizophrenia

Information processing research has suggested that the schizophrenia patient's performance on cognitive tasks is significantly diminished by the complexity of that task. The effects of cognitive complexity on a social cognitive task-sequencing actions that describe a social situation-were examined in this study. A task comprising short and long temporal sequences was administered to 26 subjects with DSM III-R diagnosis of schizophrenia. Differences in discriminating power across the short and long sequences in this task were diminished using standardization and cross-validation samples of normal control subjects. Results showed that schizophrenia patients earned significantly lower scores on the longer sequences. Additional analyses showed that the differential deficit was significantly associated with negative symptoms of social withdrawal and retardation but not with thinking disturbances associated with positive symptoms. Understanding deficits in processing situational schemata may lead to better models of the cognitive underpinnings of social functioning in schizophrenia.