Scene construction in schizophrenia.
OBJECTIVE
Recent research has revealed that schizophrenia patients are impaired in remembering the past and imagining the future. In this study, we examined patients' ability to engage in scene construction (i.e., the process of mentally generating and maintaining a complex and coherent scene), which is a key part of retrieving past experiences and episodic future thinking.


METHODS
24 participants with schizophrenia and 25 healthy controls were asked to imagine new fictitious experiences and described their mental representations of the scenes in as much detail as possible. Descriptions were scored according to various dimensions (e.g., sensory details, spatial reference), and participants also provided ratings of their subjective experience when imagining the scenes (e.g., their sense of presence, the perceived similarity of imagined events to past experiences).


RESULTS
Imagined scenes contained less phenomenological details (d = 1.11) and were more fragmented (d = 2.81) in schizophrenia patients compared to controls. Furthermore, positive symptoms were positively correlated to the sense of presence (r = .43) and the perceived similarity of imagined events to past episodes (r = .47), whereas negative symptoms were negatively related to the overall richness of the imagined scenes (r = -.43).


CONCLUSIONS
The results suggest that schizophrenic patients' impairments in remembering the past and imagining the future are, at least in part, due to deficits in the process of scene construction. The relationships between the characteristics of imagined scenes and positive and negative symptoms could be related to reality monitoring deficits and difficulties in strategic retrieval processes, respectively.
Raffard
Stéphane
S
Cognitive Psychopathology and Neuropsychology Unit, University of Geneva, 40, Boulevard du Pont-d’Arve, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland. stephraffard@hotmail.com
D'Argembeau
Arnaud
A
Bayard
Sophie
S
Boulenger
Jean-Philippe
JP
Van der Linden
Martial
M
D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D018794:Problem-Based Learning; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D055815:Young Adult