Deductive reasoning abilities in schizophrenia and related disorders: A systematic review

Background: Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, negative symptoms, and disorganized thinking. There has been a multitude of studies assessing reasoning performance in schizophrenia patients by using various reasoning tasks.

Methods: We reviewed the existing literature using the following reasoning tasks in schizophrenia and related disorders: Transitive Inferences, Wason Card Selection, conditional reasoning, syllogisms, and other related tasks. Results: Some deductive reasoning studies have reported conflicting results where schizophrenia patients sometimes, outperform or underperform healthy controls. These findings are related to the plausibility, emotional content of logical sentences used in these studies. Importantly, data show that performance in deductive reasoning tasks is impacted by emotional and cognitive processes, such as theory of mind and working memory. However, neural studies report different brain mechanisms underlying different deductive reasoning task performance.

Conclusions: Overall, there are differences in the findings of reasoning tasks which should be investigated in future studies as it will contribute towards an accurate understanding of reasoning processes in schizophrenia spectrum and related disorders.