DRiPS – Dialogical Reasoning in Patients with Schizophrenia

One of the most debilitating features of schizophrenia is patients' difficulty interacting with others. An important part of successful interaction is the ability to reason – about the relation between the discourse and the world, and about the reasoning of others. This project investigates and models how people reason in natural language dialogue, using the notion of enthymemes, and how this reasoning is different in patients with schizophrenia.

We hypothesise that social cognition impairments in patients with schizophrenia are underpinned by difficulties associated with the resources used in reasoning as it occurs in everyday interaction.

Through access to a unique corpus of triadic interactions we explore reasoning in patients' face-to-face dialogues to investigate this theory.