Features of Recognizing Other Person’s Cognitive Errors among Patients with Schizophrenia During the Perception of Communicative Situations

Relevance. Social cognition impairments in patients with schizophrenia complicate their interactions with others, adversely impacting daily functioning and the progression of the disease. Investigating these impairments is crucial for developing effective strategies for diagnosis, rehabilitation, and psychological intervention to improve patients’ quality of life.

Intention. To investigate the impairments in cognitive information processing in patients with schizophrenia while performing tasks focused on recognizing cognitive errors of characters in communicative situations.

Methodology. The study included 40 patients with paranoid schizophrenia (experimental group) and 60 healthy participants (control group). Participants’ eye-movement parameters during video perception and verbal interpretations of the clips during retelling to the experimenter were analyzed. Data analysis was performed using ANOVA and Student’s t-test.

Results. Patients with schizophrenia exhibited impairments in recognizing cognitive errors of characters in videos of social situations. These impairments were associated with difficulties in identifying task-relevant objects and events; monitoring characters’ perceptions; and comparing their own cognitive activity with that of the observed characters. Additionally, patients with schizophrenia used vague linguistic expressions to describe characters and struggled to identify features necessary for their unambiguous recognition by their interlocutors. These impairments were significantly more frequent in patients with severe deficit symptoms compared to healthy individuals and patients with mild deficits.

Conclusion. The findings underscore the importance of implementing psychocorrection programs at the early stages of the disorder. Interventions should focus on training patients in effective linguistic encoding of objects and developing skills for detailed analysis of communicative situations through the use of open-ended questions.