Saunders, A.; (2008) Schizotypy and contextual integration. Doctoral thesis , University of London.

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Abstract

Schizotypy is a personality dimension that maps on to symptom clusters found in schizophrenia. Schizotypy can help in investigating underlying cognitive processes that may be present in schizophrenia or that may indicate a greater vulnerability to schizophrenia. A current theory regarding the underlying information processing in schizophrenia is the context deficit hypothesis (e.g. Hemsley, 2005). Waters et al., (2004) found a difference in context memory between patients with schizophrenia and controls. This study employed an experimental design to investigate the role of context in memory. It compared 38 high scorers (one standard deviation above the mean) and 30 controls (mean and below) using the Schizotypal Personality Scale (Claridge and Broks, 1984) on a modified version of the Waters et al., (2004) task. The task was modified to raise the level of difficulty for the normal population. It also included self-report measures for possible confounding factors such as executive function (Hayling Burgess & Shallice, 1996), mood (HADS Zigmond & Snaith, 1983) dissociation and trauma history (Holmes & Steel, 2004). It was hypothesised that people with higher levels of schizotypy would score lower when integrating information in the memory task however, this was not supported by the results. Nor were there any significant relationships found between the possible confounding factors and the memory task. Several reasons for the lack of significant findings were discussed.

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