Objectives:

This study is to investigate the hypothesis that schizophrenic patients have difficulty in inferring mental state of others.

Methods:

Twenty schizophrenic patients and twenty normal subjects were administered to the Cartoon Task required inferring the character’s intention in a given context.

Results:

The schizophrenic patients showed a statistically significant impairment in the Cartoon Task. Both groups chose the card depicting a frequent everyday action significantly more rather than the similar card to the last picture in each story for wrong answers.

Conclusion:

These preliminary results suggest that schizophrenia is associated with a specific deficit of the cognitive ability referred to as social cognition, and this deficit can be detected not only in the acute phase as found in previous research studies, but also in remission. Also when subjects fail to appreciate what is going on in the minds of other people, they seem to rely on a socially familiar experience.