Source monitoring and cognitive functioning in people with severe mental illness

Abstract

Source Monitoring, is defined as “establishing the origin of memories, knowledge and beliefs” Considering its dependence on cognitive functioning, our aim was to assess the performance in a Source Monitoring test, of a group of people with psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder), characterized by the presence of significant cognitive deficits. Methods: 90 subjects (20-55 years) with diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and healthy controls. All patients were stable in their clinical condition. Participant completed a neuropsychological evaluation and a Source Monitoring test, in which they were asked to identify the origin (own- other¨) of a list of words. Results: Both groups of patients had a worse performance than the control group, in the Source Monitoring test. The results were correlated, with verbal learning, visual attention and cognitive flexibility tests. Multiple linear regression shows that failures in recognizing the foreign words are explained by the diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder and performance in the verbal learning function, whereas the failures of the recognition of the own words are explained by the diagnosis of subjects. In addition, people with schizophrenia showed a greater tendency to attribute to themselves, words of external origin. Conclusions: Both groups of patients performed worse than the control group in the source monitoring test, but only some of the results were directly associated with cognitive functioning. The authors propose that source monitoring may depend of metacognitive abilities.