title: When a schizophrenic deficit becomes a reasoning advantage.
abstract: A deficit in context processing has been proposed to be one of the major deficiencies in schizophrenia. A demanding reasoning task, known to promote a very reproducible bias (i.e., a reasoning error) in healthy subjects, triggered by a misleading context, was administered in 26 schizophrenic patients and 26 healthy participants. Responses at random were checked by including an additional group of 11 schizophrenic patients who performed a control version of the task. We showed that patients presented a surprising imperviousness to the reasoning bias and had significantly better logical performances than their paired healthy participants. This finding demonstrates that there are some problem solving situations where disregarding contextual information, a cognitive deficit that usually impairs schizophrenic patients gives them a cognitive advantage over healthy controls.
authors.affiliation: UMR 6194, CNRS, CEA, Université de Caen and Université Paris-Descartes (Paris-5), France. mellet@cyceron.fr
authors.forename: Emmanuel
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Mellet
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Houdé
authors.forename: Perrine
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Brazo
authors.forename: Bernard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mazoyer
authors.forename: Nathalie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Tzourio-Mazoyer
authors.forename: Sonia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dollfus
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011340:Problem Solving; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000453:epidemiology*; D012720:Severity of Illness Index