How do mental health patients respond to the AUT?

MARTIN, RAMON; ELISONDO, ROMINA; CORBALAN, JAVIER

Workshop; Sfnc-works-in-progress. The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity; 2021

The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity

BackgroundOn the one hand, general cognitive deficits are predominant in schizophrenia and severe mental health disorders, such as perseveration and lack of cognitive fluency and rigidity. On the other hand, cognitive phenomena such as over-inclusion, looseness in associative thinking and the tendency to jump to distant semantic concepts are common in these populations. For example, bipolar disorder (especially when in hypomania period). To better understand this looseness or fixation of thinking paradox we adopt a cognitive search model. We test this new approach of conceptualizing divergent thinking as a trade off between two cognitive sub processes associated with cognitive search: change and persistence, in severe mental health inpatients.MethodsWe present a pilot study with 50 severe mental health inpatients (25 psychosis, 25 major depressive disorder, assessed with a battery of executive, memory and perception tasks and correlated them with the AUT. The correction of the AUT was subdivided in switch score and persistence score. ResultsDifferent associations were found between samples. Verbal tasks (phonetic and semantic search) were associated with the AUT but only when change and persistence sub-factors were taken into account. Measures of verbal fluency were more associated with the AUT subscores, other executive functions tests did not correlate with AUT total number of responses nor with the category change or persistence. DiscussionThese results may shed some light about differences in the cognitive function mechanisms between psychosis and other major severe mental disorders and also inform about the underlying process of creativity search.Problems of interpretation of these results that would need helpThis pilot study lacks more patients, but before we continue, we would thank advice because we think that the subdivision in change and persistence reflects separate process, and that in severe mental health patients, executive function is damaged and this can impair the results in change, but not in persistence. We think that these results are promising use of the AUT and divergent thinking to help better characterize severe mental health patients cognitive’s processes. But need discussion about the subject. Why other cognitive functions don’t correlate with the AUT? We expected to find correlations between the other executive functions with the AUT. Is the AUT a different frontal test measure? Should additional measures be required to fully understand the strategies or to fully profit the costly assessment of these patients?