Cognitive dysfunction Flashcards
What is research evidence for cognitive dysfunction?
Reviews by O’Carroll and Bowie and Harvey
What did reviews find?
A majority of schizophrenics have cognitive deficits across a range of functions, such as working memory, attention and verbal learning
What does research evidence show?
Deficits don’t cause schizophrenia, they are only associated and only correlational
What are cognitive explanations of schizophrenia?
Central control system and meta-representation
What is the central control system explanation?
It is responsible for suppressing automatic thoughts and is dysfunctional, which causes thought disorder
What is research evidence for central control system?
Stirling
What is Stirling’s study?
Schizphrenics performed the Stroop task, where you have to identify the colour of the word, when the word is a different colour
What were Stirling’s findings?
Schizophrenics took 2x as long than non-schizophrenics
What is the explanation for central control system?
The stroop task is hard, and automatic processing of the word note refers with the ability to identify the colour, and success requires you to repress this, which is made harder by thought disorder
What is meta-representation?
Thoughts about our thoughts
How is meta-representation a cognitive explanation?
We represent the world in our thoughts, and need the ability to reflect on an identify own thoughts as your own
What does meta-representation explain?
Positive symptoms, such as hallucinations
What is the cause of hallucinations?
Schizophrenics don’t recognise their own thoughts as their own, so perceiving the voice as having an external source
What is evidence for metarepresentation?
Be tall
What was Bentall’s study?
Participants came up with own examples within a category and experimenter told them other examples. they were then tested a week later on who came up with each example
What were Bentall’s findings?
Schizophrenics with hallucinations performed worse than non-schizophrenics and schizophrenics without hallucinations
How will avolition affect performance on Stroop task?
Low motivation to complete task
How would delusions interfere with with performance on Stroop task?
Think difficulty of task is a conspiracy against them
How would speech poverty affect performance on the Stroop task?
Lack of will to answer if task is verbal
How would hallucinations affect performance on the Stroop task?
Misperception of stimuli
What are alternative explanations for cognitive deficits?
Attention, memory and verbal learning effect performance, difficult to establish dysfunction causes schizophrenia and difficult to link specific symptoms to deficits
How would attention deficits affect performance on the Bentall’s study?
Participants didn’t engage fully
How would memory deficits affect performance on the Bentall study?
Weak processing or recall after a week
How would verbal learning deficits affect performance on the Bentall task?
Tasks were verbal so affected by weak processing
