Abstract
Background: Individuals’ information processing includes automatic and effortful processes and the latter require sustained concentration or attention and larger amounts of cognitive “capacity.” Event-related potentials (ERPs) reflect all neural activities that are related to a certain stimulus. Investigating ERP characteristics of effortful cognitive processing in people with schizophrenia would be helpful in further understanding the neural mechanism of schizophrenia.Methods: Both schizophrenia patients (SCZ, n = 33) and health controls (HC, n = 33) completed ERP measurements during the performance of the basic facial emotion identification test (BFEIT) and the face-vignette task (FVT). Data of ERP components (N100, P200, and N250), BFEIT and FVT performances were analyzed.Results: Schizophrenia patients’ accuracies of face emotion detection in the BFEIT and vignette emotion detection in the FVT were both significantly worse than the performance of the HC group. Repeated-measures ANOVAs performed on mean amplitudes and latencies revealed that the interaction effect for group × experiment × site (prefrontal, frontal, central, parietal, and occipital site) was significant for N250 amplitude. In FVT experiment, N250 amplitudes at prefrontal and frontal sites in schizophrenia group were larger than those of HC group; the maximum N250 amplitude was present at the prefrontal site in both the groups. For N250 latency, the interaction effect for group × experiment was significant; N250 latencies in the schizophrenia group were longer than those of the HC group.Conclusion: Schizophrenia patients present effortful cognitive processing dysfunctions which reflect in abnormal ERP components, especially N250 at prefrontal cortex and frontal cortex sites. These findings have important implications for further clarifying the neural mechanism of effortful cognitive processing deficits in schizophrenia.
Highlights
Schizophrenia protect is a severe mental disorder characterized by destruction of thinking, sense of self, emotional response, logical reasoning, cognition, perceptions and volitional behavior
For facevignette task (FVT), significant difference was found in correct vignette response proportions between the schizophrenia patients and the HCs (t = 2.546, 2.659; p = 0.013, 0.008)
The capacity of effortful cognitive processing was determined by the ability of schizophrenia patients to apply contextual information when judging the meaning of facial expressions, while the capacity of automatic cognitive processing was determined by the sample emotion identification task
Summary
Schizophrenia protect is a severe mental disorder characterized by destruction of thinking, sense of self, emotional response, logical reasoning, cognition, perceptions and volitional behavior. Among all the major symptoms of schizophrenia, cognitive dysfunction authentically contributes to the disabling nature of the disorder (Bowie et al, 2006; Stern, 2012). Individuals’ information processing includes automatic processes and effortful processes. Automatic cognition processing requires almost no attention to be allocated to the task at hand and in many instances is executed in response to a specific stimulus. Individuals’ information processing includes automatic and effortful processes and the latter require sustained concentration or attention and larger amounts of cognitive “capacity.” Event-related potentials (ERPs) reflect all neural activities that are related to a certain stimulus. Investigating ERP characteristics of effortful cognitive processing in people with schizophrenia would be helpful in further understanding the neural mechanism of schizophrenia
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