Schizophrenia and Metaphor Comprehension

Deamer et al. (2019) investigated metaphor processing in patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects. The task consisted of spoken stories with a methaphor or were literally Based. Participants had to choose the correct picture that did match the spoken story. Participants performed also a first-order theory of mind task.

Eye-tracki notationg eye fixations of the participants was used when they did interpret the target sentences metaphorically, hyperbolically, and literally.

Patients with schizophrenia performed more worse than healthy control subjects on the task. When participants did choose a picture that was incorrect (did not match with the spoken sentence) in the task regarding metaphors, they almost always chose the literal picture. However, this result was found to be found significantly more pronounced in the patients with schizophrenia. Eye-tracking results revealed no differences among the groups which is according to the authors suggestive to be a result of inhibitory control impairments, due to giving more attention to litaral meanings in the patients with schizophrenia (Deamer et al., 2019).