Speaker: Gina Kuperberg – Dennett Stibel Professor in Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Psychiatrist, Massachusetts General Hospital

Discussant: Deb Titone – Canada Research Chair in Language & Multilingualism, Department of Psychology, McGill University

Date: December 17th, 2021

Time: 9-11AM ET

Speaker: Tilo Kircher – Professor of Psychiatry and Chair, Dept. Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany

Discussant: Lena Palaniyappan – Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

Date: November 19th, 2021

Time: 9-11AM ET

Speaker: Brian MacWhinney, Department of Psychology Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University

Discussant: Iris Sommer, University Medical Center Groningen

Date: October 29th, 2021

Time: 9-11AM ET

Speakers:

Cheryl Corcoran, Cheryl Corcoran MD is Associate Professor and Program Leader in Psychosis Risk

Guillermo Cecchi, Principal Research Staff Member – Manager, Computational Psychiatry and Neuroimaging – Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY USA

Discussant: Natália Mota, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Date: September 24th, 2021

Time: 9-11AM ET

Speaker: Peter Liddle, Professor of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences University of Nottingham.

Title: ‘The nature of fragmentation in schizophrenia’

Discussant: Peter McKenna – Professor of Psychiatry, FIDMAG, Spain

On Friday 27th August 2021, we commenced the first talk of our DISCOURSE Seminar Series on the precursors, consequences and clinical correlates of fragmentation in schizophrenia, as well as a potential underlying mechanism. The recording of this talk by Prof Peter Liddle can be accessed through this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtqIpWc7t1k

Prof Peter McKenna, as discussant, raised a number of pertinent and outstanding issues which led to a lively and fruitful discussion among attendees. From Prof Liddle’s talk, Prof McKenna raised points around the relationships between disorganization and phenomena such as cognitive impairment, reality distortion and catatonia. In relation to formal thought disorder more broadly, the orthogonality between poverty of speech and poverty of content of speech was debated, alongside evidence for hyperpriming and points of difference between formal thought disorder, frontal lobe-related disorganisation and fluent dysphasia. 

Other points raised by attendees included whether the mental representations among individuals with disorganised symptoms were intact, and if problems were just within the maintenance/predictive ability of otherwise functional representations. Furthermore, predictive mechanisms within speech may differ from that in other domains, with some discrepancies between the assumptions of psycholinguistics and predictive coding noted. It might be problematic to established a predictive coding mechanism for language production. The discussion also expanded on the role of different cognitive domains (executive function, semantic memory, theory of mind) in relation to disorganized symptoms. For theory of mind, it was also discussed in relation to discourse/speech markers. 

You are highly encouraged to watch this recorded talk and formulate your own opinions on these issues. 

We’ll see you at the next talk in this series on Computational Linguistics on Friday 24th September 2021, 9am ET/2pm BST/11pm AEST.