Impaired insight is common in schizophrenia. Etiological models focusing on single determinants have not succeeded in explaining insight deficits. More complex models seem promising. This study tests Startup's (1996) model of insight and cognition, predicting a curvilinear relationship and specific insight-cognition configurations. Patients with…

The remediation of executive function in patients with schizophrenia is important in rehabilitation because these skills affect the patient's capacity to function in the community. There is evidence that instructional techniques can improve deficits in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) in some schizophrenia patients. We used a standard…

Recent fMRI and TMS studies on idiom comprehension have shown that the prefrontal cortex is involved in idiom processing. Since schizophrenic patients exhibit prefrontal "structural" changes and dysexecutive "behavioural" deficits, we hypothesised an impairment in idiom comprehension, correlating with performance on executive…

Previous research revealed that the basal ganglia play a critical role in category learning [Ell, S. W., Marchant, N. L., & Ivry, R. B. (2006). "Focal putamen lesions impair learning in rule-based, but not information-integration categorization tasks." "Neuropsychologia", 44(10), 1737-1751; Maddox, W. T. & Filoteo, J.…

In this paper, we describe the development of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). We trace the history of sorting tasks from the studies of Narziss Ach on the psychology of thinking, via the work of Kurt Goldstein and Adhemar Gelb on brain lesioned patients around 1920 and subsequent developments, up to the actual design of the WCST by Harry…

Semantic short-term memory (STM) patients have a reduced ability to retain semantic information over brief delays but perform well on other semantic tasks; this pattern suggests damage to a dedicated buffer for semantic information. Alternatively, these difficulties may arise from mild disruption to domain-general semantic processes that have…

The aim of this study was to investigate deficits in planning ability using an adapted version of the Modified Six Elements Test, from the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome--BADS [Wilson, B. A., Alderman, N., Burgess, P. W., Emslie, H., & Evans, J. J. (1996). "Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome…

The full version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) (S. Heaton and others, 1993) was compared to a 64-card version (WCST-64) using normative data and results from 350 neuropsychological patients. The WCST-64 was found useful only for respondents obtaining five or more categories by the end of the first deck. (SLD)

There has been a long-standing debate in the fields of philosophy and cognitive science surrounding the relationship of language to cognition, but the exact nature of this relationship is still unclear (Sokolov, 1968/1972). In the current study, we explored the role of language in one aspect of cognition, namely problem solving, by administering…