Processing of context information in schizophrenia: relation to clinical symptoms and WCST performance

Failure in contextual information processing has been hypothesized as being the single function responsible for several impairments in cognitive tasks and symptoms, through an involvement of the prefrontal cortex, in patients with schizophrenia. A variant of the Continuous Performance Test (CPT) designed specifically to elicit deficits in the processing of contextual information has been administered to 20 schizophrenic patients and 20 healthy controls. The relation to Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), relatively specific to prefrontal damage and executive dysfunctioning, and clinical status by using scales for the assessment of positive, negative symptoms and outcome has been investigated. The data show that multi-episode schizophrenic patients manifest inability to use contextual information to inhibit habitual response to an ambiguous stimulus and to maintain information across delay, without a general attention deficit. We also found a relationship between contextual reasoning and WCST unique errors, hallucinations, formal thought disorders, and outcome evaluation. Our results further support the hypothesis that the deficit of contextual reasoning could account for cognitive impairments and symptoms of patients with schizophrenia. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.