Functional disorganization of representations in schizophrenia

The first part of this article describes a model of disorganization of representations in schizophrenia. We assume that subjects with schizophrenia have some interfering activity in memory. Such an interfering activity induces a functional decontextualization of information and the reciprocal is true. This model accounts for different classes of cognitive troubles that have been observed in schizophrenia. In the second part, we describe a text-comprehension experiment that studies two paradigmatic cases of episodic and semantic contextualization of information: the "compartmentalization" and the "thematization" of fictional narratives. Compartmentalization refers to the way in which representations of different narratives are separated in memory; thematization refers to the way in which representations of one narrative are structured in function of a theme. In our experiment, compartmentalization and thematization are assessed by a method of priming in word recognition. In agreement with our model, the results show that subjects with schizophrenia are impaired in compartmentalization and thematization when compared with anxious-depressed subjects.