CHARACTERIZATION OF NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL IMPAIRMENT IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

在过去的一年里，我们试图更全面地描述精神分裂症的认知障碍。我们也开始研究精神分裂症患者记忆衰退的机制。患者的困难似乎不是由于对干扰、编码或错误记忆问题的易感性的定性异常。我们已经开始对精神分裂症的情景记忆障碍进行计算建模，以确定它们是由于普遍的噪音还是由于记忆处理的单一阶段。我们使用不同的语义加工范式研究了精神分裂症的无组织言语。一般来说，患者的困难不在于词汇量的大小，而在于他们如何自动获取词汇，这在启动范式中得到了证明。因此，我们设计了一系列新颖的实验任务来评估精神分裂症患者是否表现出词汇完整性和语义异常之间的分离。本研究利用精神分裂症患者、阿尔茨海默病患者和儿童来发现言语词汇的大小与其组织之间的分离。如果是这样的话，那么它对正常的认知结构有重要的影响。我们还发现使用非语言变形任务和反应时间任务患者在理解实体是什么方面没有过度困难，他们理解事物之间关系的能力是不正常的。最后，一项强调中间表型的精神分裂症遗传研究正在进行中。我们正在使用大量的神经认知测量来表征这种中间表型。我们的基本原理是，患者没有遗传精神分裂症，但有多种对认知障碍的易感性和随之而来的神经生理异常。我们将使用极端不一致对（受影响未受影响）和受影响的兄弟姐妹对选择变量，并试图找到认知变量和遗传标记之间的联系。我们已经发现，一些认知测量会产生较高的相对风险，而这些风险与诊断无关。-认知，精神分裂症，神经心理学-人类受试者：访谈，问卷调查或仅调查

For the past year we have attempted to characterize more completely the cognitive impairments in schizophrenia. We have also begun work on the mechanisms accounting for failures in memory in schizophrenia. Patients difficulties do not appear to be due to qualitative abnormalities in susceptibility to interference, encoding, or false memory problems. We have begun to comnputationally model the episodic memory impairments in schizophrenia in order to determine if they are due to general noise or a single stage in mnemonic processing. We have examined disorganized speech in schizophrenia using various semantic processing paradigms. In general patients have difficulties not with the size of their lexicon but rather how they access it automatically, as evidenced in priming paradigms. Thus, we have devised a battery of novel experimental tasks to assess whether schizophrenic patients show a dissociation between lexical integrity and semantic abnormality. This study utilizes patients with schizophrenia, patients with Alzheimers disease and children to find dissociations between the size of the verbal lexicon and its organization. If this is the case then it has important implications for normal cognitive architecture. We have also found using both a nonverbal morphing task and a reaction time task that patients do not have undue difficulty with understanding what an entity is, it is their ability to understand the relations between things that is abnormal. Finally, a genetic study of schizophrenia with an emphasis on intermediate phenotypes is ongoing. We are using a large battery of neurocognitive measures to characterize this intermediate phenotype. We base this on the rationale that patients do not inherit schizophrenia but a variety of susceptibilities to cognitive impairments and their attendant neurophysiologic abnormalities. We will use extreme discordant pairs (affected unaffected) and affected sib pairs for selected variables and attempt to find linkage between cognitive variables and genetic markers. We have already found that some cognitive measures yield high relative risks that are not redundant with diagnosis. - cognition, schizophrenia, neuropsychology - Human Subjects: Interview, Questionaires, or Surveys Only