Schizophrenia: A Disorder of Timing and Sensorimotor Integration During Decision-Making

Abstract

Sensorimotor integration and decision-making essentially contribute to time perception by integrating different sources of sensory stimuli and using them for performance in cognition and adaptation to the environment. Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder where brain connectivity, and therefore, the integration of cognitive, motor and sensory information is disturbed. The present chapter discusses changes in sensorimotor integration and decision-making, such as in time interval judgment in schizophrenic patients. The results highlight that schizophrenic patients cannot build appropriate and accurate representations of the environment to perform tasks. Some defend schizophrenia as a disorder associated with abnormal neural inputs causing difficulty for these individuals to deal with decision-making feedback. Moreover, the hypothesis that these failures may be due to a dysconnectivity among different brain areas during the sensorimotor integration, and decision-making became attractive.