Norris says that all thought exhibits a certain structure – formal thought, which is the act of thinking, and objective thought, which is the object of the thinking.
A pattern of interruption or disorganization of thought processes is broadly referred to as formal thought disorder, and might be described more specifically as thought blocking, fusion, loosening of associations, tangential thinking, derailment of thought, or knight's move thinking.
Previous studies demonstrated a deficit of the attribution of intentions to others among patients having formal thought disorder.
Altogether results suggest that automatic semantic spreading activation is unimpaired in schizophrenia patients without formal thought disorder.
We also found a relationship between contextual reasoning and WCST unique errors, hallucinations, formal thought disorders, and outcome evaluation.
These results are in line with the general evidence of impaired implicit priming observed only in patients with formal thought disorder.
Although this has been studied in terms of formal thought disorder, the level of involvement of altered latent semantic structure is less clear.
Furthermore, D1 receptor dysfunction has been described in schizophrenia, and patients with formal thought disorder seem to have disturbed focusing of associations and increased indirect priming.
Thirty schizophrenia patients, without formal thought disorder, and twenty-nine healthy controls participated in a lexical decision task in which prime-target associative strength (strong, weak and not related) and stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA: 250 ms and 750 ms) were manipulated.
Supporting learners to think spatially means considering learning environment designs that provide the imaginative mental states about concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning that underlie more formal thought (Waller, 2014).
