A review on inductive reasoning abilities in schizophrenia and related disorders

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are characterized by delusions, hallucinations, negative, and disorganized symptoms. There are several studies which have assessed reasoning performance in schizophrenia patients by using various reasoning tasks (e.g., the Beads Task). However, we reviewed prior work and examine the similarities and differences among inductive reasoning tasks, and how they relate to schizophrenia symptoms. We reviewed the existing literature using the following reasoning tasks administered on patients with schizophrenia and related disorders: The Beads, The Survey Task, and The Aha! Sentence Task. In majority of the inductive reasoning studies, it was found that schizophrenia patients make choices based on relatively less evidence and that inductive reasoning performance is related to delusions, paranoid thoughts, and perceptual thoughts. Importantly, data have shown that performance in inductive reasoning tasks is similarly impacted by emotional and cognitive processes, such as theory of mind and working memory. However, neural studies report different brain mechanisms underlying inductive reasoning task performance. Overall, there are differences in the findings of reasoning tasks that should be investigated in future studies as it will contribute towards an accurate understanding of reasoning processes in schizophrenia spectrum and related disorders.