About This Project

Schizophrenia is currently diagnosed only by clinical visits. However, my lab has been studying subtle timing differences between people with schizophrenia and healthy controls. To that end, we've shown that schizophrenia can be assessed by a 30-second visual test that takes advantage of timing differences. We now seek to understand the sensitivity and specificity of our visual test on the way to wide-scale deployment.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

A bedrock aspect of cognition is the perception of time. Accurate time perception is required to correctly judge the order of incoming events, and thus causality. Without proper judgments in the time domain, humans suffer fragmented cognition. Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in temporal judgments such as duration. Although time perception has emerged as a dynamic field in cognitive neuroscience, temporal measures are mostly absent from the clinical landscape. We propose that a straightforward visual task developed in my laboratory offers an opportunity for standardized, fine-grained, discrete testing of time perception, uncontaminated by other cognitive process. Our preliminary data demonstrate that temporal measures can sensitively distinguish schizophrenic patients from healthy controls, thereby providing a stable yardstick for this aspect of cognitive functioning.

What is the significance of this project?

Given the importance of time perception as a basic cognitive building block, this work opens the door to a totally novel method for rapid cognitive assessment in schizophrenic populations. Successful completion of this project will put us one step closer to a user-friendly and rapid cognitive assessment tool for clinical use with schizophrenia. Such a test can be used in nursing offices at the high school and college levels, massively expanding detection and the social safety net.

What are the goals of the project?

We have developed a method to rapidly and non-invasively detect temporal deficits characteristic of schizophrenia. Because of the simplicity of our simple`game-like task, patients with schizophrenia are capable of comprehending and performing the task without difficulty. Our goal here is to further develop these temporal measures, enhance their sensitivity, establish test-retest reliability, minimize subject burden, correlate with other measures of schizophrenia, and adapt the tasks for wide spread use in diverse clinical settings. This research will deliver a user-friendly and rapid cognitive assessment tool for clinical use with schizophrenia.