Dorie Reed

The relationship of social cognition to ward behavior in chronic schizophrenia.

The relationship between social cognition (i.e., cognition for social stimuli) and ward behavior among individuals with chronic schizophrenia was investigated. Twenty-seven inpatients completed a battery of cognitive and social-cognitive tasks and were rated by staff on various indices of ward behavior. Overall, there was a relationship between the measures of social cognition and behavior on the ward. Social cognition contributed unique variance beyond cognition to maladaptive behavior on the ward (i.e., irritability). Implications for assessment and future research are discussed.

Cognition and social functioning in schizophrenia

This article reviews three studies investigating the relationship between information processing and social functioning in schizophrenia. The most consistent finding is the association between vigilance performance on a hybrid continuous performance/span of apprehension task and various indices of social functioning (e.g., ward behavior). However, the nature of the information processing-social functioning relationships is mutable and appears dependent on a number of factors (e.g., cross-sectional versus longitudinal designs). This article concludes with a discussion of treatment implications and future research directions.

Changing cognitive functioning in rehabilitation of schizophrenia.

A three‐factor model is proposed for clinical assessment of cognitive and neuropsychological impairments in schizophrenia. The first factor is stable, pervasive and vulnerability‐linked. The second and third include executive, memory and conceptual abilities and are episode‐linked. The third factor may be amenable to psychosocial treatment.

Priming by “predictive” context stimuli in visual classification

Subjects participated in visual character- and word-classification tasks for which spatially contiguous context stimuli were exposed 100 or 1,000 msec prior to target onset. These context stimuli were physically identical to the target on 75% of the trials. Substantial facilitation of RT occurred for “valid” trials at both SOA levels. When the target differed from the context stimuli, evidence for priming the response category, as well as the semantic category of the target (letters vs. digits; metal names vs. furniture names), was obtained at the 100-msec SOA, but these effects were attenuated with the 1,000-msec SOA. With a full second to process a stimulus-predictive cue, subjects appear to develop a stimulus-specific expectation of the target that does not involve maintaining the category or response-mapping codes that are active with shorter delays.