Cognitive explanation

• Dysfunctional thought processing

  Information processing that doesn't represent reality accurately.
• Metarepresentation

  Firth et al

  Cognitive ability to reflect on own thoughts + behaviors.
• Metarepresentation dysfunction

  Disrupted ability to recognise our own thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else. (explains insertion)
• Central control

  Cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate response.
• Central control dysfunction

  Inability to suppress automatic thoughts + speech triggered by other thoughts.

  (speech poverty + disogansied speech)
• Bentall's categories task: procedure

  Pp's were given categories with examples and then they had to give examples of their own.

  One week later, pp's were tested to see if they could distinguish the examples they were given and gave from each other.
• Bentall's categories task: findings

  People with SZ who experience hallucinations performed worse than people with SZ who didn't experience hallucinations + people without SZ.

  They had problems with metarepresentation
• Stirling's Stroop task: procedure

  Pp's were shown words that were colours which where the definition was different to the colour of the lettering.

  The pp's had to identify what the colour of the lettering was.
• Stirling's Stroop task: findings

  People with SZ took 2x the amount of time to identify the colour than the control group.

  They had problems with their central control.
• Limitations: (proximal origins)

  Only explains what is happening now to produce symptoms.

  Does not explain distal explanations such as genetics + family dysfunction.

  Not a strong explanation alone.
• Limitations: (direction of causality)

  Unclear if the cognitive factors are a result of schizophrenia or if it is the other way round.