Mental rotation in schizophrenia.
Motor imagery provides a direct insight into action representations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of impairment of action monitoring in schizophrenia by evaluating the performance of schizophrenic patients on mental rotation tasks. We raised the following questions: (1) Are schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery both at the explicit and at the implicit level? (2) Are body parts more difficult for them to mentally rotate than objects? (3) Is there any link between the performance and the hallucinating symptom profile? The schizophrenic patients (n = 13) displayed the same pattern of performance as the control subjects (n = 13). More particularly, schizophrenic patients' reaction time varied as a function of the angular disparity of the stimuli. On the other hand, they were significantly slower and less accurate. Interestingly, patients suffering from hallucinations made significantly more errors than non-hallucinatory patients. We discussed these latter results in terms of deficit of the forward model. We emphasized the necessity to distinguish different levels of action, more or less impaired in schizophrenia.
de Vignemont
Frédérique
F
Institut des Sciences Cognitives, UMR 5015, 67 Bd Pinel, 69675 Bron, France. fvignemont@isc.cnrs.fr
Zalla
Tiziana
T
Posada
Andrés
A
Louvegnez
Anne
A
Koenig
Olivier
O
Georgieff
Nicolas
N
Franck
Nicolas
N
D000328:Adult; D014150:Antipsychotic Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006212:Hallucinations; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes; D008875:Middle Aged; D009043:Motor Activity; D012016:Reference Values; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000188:drug therapy; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology
D014150:Antipsychotic Agents