Schizophrenia & Learning Flashcards
What were the results of Morris et al.’s (2013) study on bias towards previously predictive stimuli with schizophrenic patients?
Predictive bias is reduced in patients with schizophrenia, especially patients that have high levels of positive symptoms.
During presentation of pictures early in an experiment, as opposed to pictures presented late in the experiment, when would dopamine neurones have high rates of firing?
When the reward is presented early in training, or when the reward is presented after a second picture, following exposure to the first picture with rewards.
Define the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
Positive symptoms include hallucinatins, delusions and irrational thoughts/beliefs.
Negative symptoms include reduce affect (emotion) and catatonia (abnormal movement).
What are the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia?
Deficits in working memory and inability to perform the Stroop task.
Identify the main purpose of associative learning experiments that focus on positive symptoms of schizophrenia.
Regulation of attention.
What are the learning protocols used in schizophrenic associative learning experiments?
Blocking and latent inhibition, in which a familiar stimulus takes longer to acquire meaning than a new stimulus. People with schizophrenia have reduce latent inhibition.
Define and explain the consequence of not regulating attention in schizophrenic patients.
Not regulating attention leads to the developed of abberant salience, wherein people with schizophrenia pay equal attention to irrelevant stimuli as they do to relevant stimuli.
What did Waelti, Dickinson and Schultz (2001) find out about dopamine neuron firing in monkeys?
Dopamine neurons had higher firing to the presence of predicted rewards, while dopamine firing was lower for unpredicted rewards or no rewards. There was little to no dopamine firing when they unpredictably got no reward.
What is motivational salience?
A cognitive process and form of attention that motivates an individual’s behavior towards or away from a particular object, event or outcome.
What was Gray et. al. (1992)’s latent inhibition experiment?
Participants were given amphetamine, a dopamine-influencing drug, before doing a latent inhibition test. Latent inhibition was reduced by amphetamine agonist, which increases dopamine firing.
The antagonist drug Haloperidal enhanced latent inhibition in healthy adults, therefore reducing dopamine firing.
