Is disorganization a feature of schizophrenia or a modifying influence: evidence of covariation of perceptual and cognitive organization in a non-patient sample.

A subgroup of people with schizophrenia is characterized by reduced organization in perception, thought, language, and motor functioning, and these impairments covary significantly. While this may reflect multiple expressions of an illness-related core processing impairment, it may also represent the extreme end of an organization-disorganization dimension that is found throughout the general population. In this view, disorganization is a modifying influence on illness expression. To obtain preliminary information on this hypothesis, we examined covariation of perceptual and cognitive organization in a non-patient sample. Subjects completed a battery of perceptual tasks with demonstrated sensitivity to schizophrenia and disorganization, and a battery of questionnaires examining cognitive organization. Our results indicated that level of perceptual organization ability, across multiple tasks, was associated with self-reported levels of cognitive organization on multiple measures. This is thus preliminary evidence for a common process affecting perceptual and cognitive organization in the general population, suggesting that disorganization may reflect a modifying influence mechanism, instead of an illness-related process, in schizophrenia.