Recognition of Other Person’s Cognitive Errors and Its Impairment in Schizophrenia

Abstract

The term “cognitive errors” refers to the errors in the perception and analysis of information about the environment. In our study healthy people and patients with schizophrenia were presented with a “silent” video clip in which the main character makes a cognitive error in perceiving some situation. After watching the video clip the subjects explained the character’s behavior and described his or her cognitive error. We analyzed the differences in eye movements in the subjects who recognized and failed to recognize the character’s cognitive error. We identified three factors that support the recognition of other person’s cognitive errors: (1) co-operative orientation of cognitive activity; (2) specific cognitive activity of the observer; (3) the observer’s ability to compare his/her own cognitive activity with that of the observed person. We show that in subjects with schizophrenia the difficulties in recognizing other people’s cognitive errors may be associated with the impairment of each of these factors.

Keywords

• cognitive errors
• theory of mind
• schizophrenia
• visual perception
• visual attention