title: Inflexible information acquisition strategies mediate visuo-spatial reasoning in stabilized schizophrenia patients.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Cognitive deficits are of fundamental importance to the clinical picture of schizophrenia and are on the verge to be included as diagnostic criteria in the DSM-V. While focusing on information processing deficits, no emphasis has been put on whether patients' deficits can be accounted for by maladaptive information acquisition strategy deployment.
  
  
  METHODS
  We tested 24 stabilized patients with schizophrenia and 25 matched controls in a visuo-spatial analogy task with graded difficulty. Eye movement recordings served to identify information acquisition strategies.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Patients compared to healthy controls showed slower reaction times in the easiest condition and higher error rates in the more difficult conditions. Eye movement recordings illustrated that overall mean fixation duration increased with increasing task difficulty in healthy controls only. Further, patients deployed a more efficient strategy ("constructive matching") less often than healthy controls in the easier conditions.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These results suggest that information acquisition strategies mediate visuo-spatial cognitive performance in schizophrenia. Patients adopt a less efficient strategy independently of task difficulty indicated by a characteristic behavioural pattern. Our results point to a powerful tool of improving patients' performance in cognitively demanding tasks by training them in more flexible cognitive (e.g., information acquisition) strategy deployment.
authors.affiliation: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Psychology, Berlin, Germany. Steffen.Landgraf@Psychologie.HU-Berlin.de
authors.forename: Steffen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Landgraf
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Amado
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brucks
authors.forename: Frank
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Krueger
authors.forename: Marie-Odile
authors.initials: MO
authors.lastname: Krebs
authors.forename: Elke van der
authors.initials: Ev
authors.lastname: Meer
mesh_terms: D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D055815:Young Adult