BOSTON: A mild zap improves cognitive control in people with schizophrenia and may lead to new therapies.
Applying mild electrical stimulation to an area of the brain associated with cognitive control helps people with schizophrenia to recognize errors and adjust their behavior to avoid them as much as it helps healthy subjects do so, according to a new study.
One of the core symptoms of schizophrenia is poor cognitive control – a constellation of abilities including working memory, attention, focus and error-monitoring. Error-monitoring can be measured by “post-error slowing” – the almost imperceptible pause healthy people take after committing a mistake, like making a typo, in order to avoid doing it again.