Bridging Access to Consciousness, Cognitive Control and Metacognition : toward an application to Schizophrenia

The series of experiments carried out in the framework of my PhD research aimed to shed some light on the relationships between (un)conscious processing, cognitive control and metacognition (second-order judgments). More specifically, it consisted in investigated the issue of whether and how second-order judgments were influenced by some parameters of the corresponding first-order judgment, namely the load of cognitive control and the conscious versus non conscious nature of the information it is contingent on. These experiments, combined with recent empirical evidence and models of second-order judgments (Pleksac and Busemeyer, 2010) are consistent with a partial overlap between the prefrontal regions involved in metacognitive judgments and those involved in cognitive control and access to consciousness. That led us to consider the hypothesis that specific cognitive and metacognitive deficits could explain the loss of sense of authorship observed in schizophrenia.  To this purpose, an observational study was carried out in patients recovered after at least one psychotic episode. It involved two different populations, one having received a diagnosis of schizophrenia (schizophrenia group), the other of bipolar disorders (bipolar group). The paradigm consisted in a cognitive control task in which the subjects had to self-evaluate after each response (metacognitive task).  The preliminary results suggest that the clinical groups display very different cognitive and metacognitive profiles. In particular, compared to bipolar group, the schizophrenia group seems to be impaired in both cognitive control and metacognitive tasks. The schizophrenia group also showed correlations between cognitive control impairments and several metacognitive measures. The question of the correlation of these deficits with clinical variables will be considered, as far as they could present an interest for diagnose.