Banca de DEFESA: LARISSA MIRELLY DOS SANTOS RODRIGUES SARAIVA

schizophrenia, executive functions, noise sensitivity, cocktail party, neuropsychological assessment

Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disorder that involves positive, negative and cognitive symptoms. In this study, we focused on a fourth category of symptoms that would be the sensory-perceptual ones, where noise sensitivity (NS) would be included in this modality. The objective of the research was to investigate NS and the cocktail party effect on the performance of executive function tasks (EF) in people with schizophrenia. The sample consisted of 40 people, 26 males and 14 females, and was divided into the Schizophrenia Group (SchG), with 20 people diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the Health Control (HC), with 20 people without neuropsychiatric disorders. Three EF tests were used, namely the trail making test (TMT), Corsi Blocks and Labyrinth. The volunteers performed the test with and without the presence of noise/sound. Half of the sample performed the test first with noise and the other half first without noise to prevent the order of testing from being an intervening variable. Significant differences were found in all three EF tests used when comparing the HC and SchG. In the TMT, most participants with schizophrenia took longer to complete the task, presenting worse performance. In the Corsi blocks test, SchG participants got fewer block order sequences right, resulting in considerably lower scores. In the maze test, a considerably smaller number of mazes were successfully executed by SchG participants. The worst performance of SchG in all tests was independent of the condition with noise/sound or without noise/sound. There was a greater NS in SchG patients, since they had a lower performance in the tests during the presence of noise, while the HC showed the same performance in both conditions. The results found corroborate the hypothesis that “cocktail party” noise interferes with the performance of some executive function tasks in people with schizophrenia.