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 ( = 21), schizotypal personality traits ( = 25), and healthy controls ( = 40) performed VFT with "animals" as the category.