The Size Constancy Problem in Schizophrenia

An attempt was made to reconcile discrepant findings in the size constancy performance of poor premorbid, process, non‐paranoid schizophrenic men. It was postulated that an impairment of basic cognitive skills, and particularly of conservation, differentiates schizophrenics and normals, and under‐constant and over‐constant non‐paranoid schizophrenics, and that this and an associated primitive visual centration effect may lead to paradoxical over‐constancy for some schizophrenics. The results confirm that schizophrenics may be both under‐ and over‐constant, and that they exhibit significantly low levels in primitive cognitive operations. The latter abnormalities are particularly marked in over‐constant schizophrenics, for whom there is strong evidence of centration with a distant standard. Contradictory findings of over‐ as well as under‐constancy in non‐paranoid schizophrenics may thus be a function, apart from other determinants, of differences in the availability of conserving operations, and differences in centration strategies, where the latter would be influenced by characteristics of the experimental display

Centration · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Constant (computer programming) · Developmental psychology · Paranoid schizophrenia · Perception · Psychiatry · Psychosis · Schizophrenia (object-oriented programming) · Subjective constancy · Clinical Reasoning and Diagnostic Skills · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Neuroscience · Psychology · Schizophrenia research and treatment