Semantic Search in Psychosis: Modeling Local Exploitation and Global Exploration

Impairments in category verbal fluency task (VFT) performance have been widely documented in psychosis. These deficits may be due to disturbed “cognitive foraging” in semantic space, in terms of altered salience of cues that influence individuals to search locally within a subcategory of semantically related responses (“clustering”) or globally between subcategories (“switching”). To test this, we conducted a study in which individuals with schizophrenia (n = 21), schizotypal personality traits (n = 25), and healthy controls (n = 40) performed VFT with “animals” as the category. Distributional semantic model Word2Vec computed cosine-based similarities between words according to their statistical usage in a large text corpus. We then applied a validated foraging-based search model to these similarity values to obtain salience indices of frequency-based global search cues and similarity-based local cues. Analyses examined whether diagnosis predicted VFT performance, search strategies, cue salience, and the time taken to switch between vs search within clusters. Compared to control and schizotypal groups, individuals with schizophrenia produced fewer words, switched less, and exhibited higher global cue salience, indicating a selection of more common words when switching to new clusters. Global cue salience negatively associated with vocabulary ability in controls and processing speed in schizophrenia. Lastly, individuals with schizophrenia took a similar amount of time to switch to new clusters compared to control and schizotypal groups but took longer to transition between words within clusters. Findings of altered local exploitation and global exploration through semantic memory provide preliminary evidence of aberrant cognitive foraging in schizophrenia.