Abstract
Processes involved in establishing the source of information and the genesis of hallucinations in schizophrenic patients. Recent studies have shown that schizophrenic patients with a history of hallucinations and hallucination-prone normal subjects have difficulties to establish the origin of their memory representations. Two possible causes for this deficit have been suggested: a general failure in the source monitoring process, or a specific failure in the heuristic and/or analytic processes involved in source monitoring. The aim of this study was to find out whether hallucinating schizophrenic patients exhibit any failure in the processes (heuristic versus analytic) underlying decisions about the origin of their memories. An experiment was carried out in order to find out how schizophrenic patients, both hallucinating and non-hallucinating, determine the origin of their memories, when such memories are derived from an internal source (i.e. self-generated), by using either heuristic or analytic processes. Our results suggest that schizophrenic hallucinating patients tend to assign an external source to their own, self-generated memories, irrespective of the processing strategy employed.
