Motor Function and Social Cognition in Schizophrenia

Motor function and social cognition are intimately linked domains that are disrupted in schizophrenia. Motor function encompasses skilled movement, postural control and complex actions such as speech and gesture. In schizophrenia these processes may be impaired at multiple levels of neural circuitry, including the cerebellum, basal ganglia and frontoparietal networks. Social cognition refers to the mental operations underlying social interactions, such as interpreting facial expressions, understanding others’ intentions and coordinating turn-taking in dialogue. Patients with schizophrenia often exhibit subtle motor signs—abnormal postural sway, reduced gesture precision and speech irregularities—that correlate with deficits in emotion perception, nonverbal communication and rapport. These impairments can emerge before full clinical onset and serve both as markers of vulnerability and targets for rehabilitation. Integrative approaches that combine movement assessment with social-cognitive measures are revealing mechanistic pathways and pointing to novel therapeutic avenues aimed at restoring dynamic gesture use, speech fluency and interpersonal synchrony.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have leveraged virtual agents to probe behavioural synchronisation in social contexts. In one seminal investigation, individuals with schizophrenia and healthy controls interacted with an immersive virtual partner whose head and torso movements were either mimicked or not. Both groups showed increased synchronisation of limb movements and greater self-reported rapport when the agent imitated the participant’s gestures, demonstrating that mimicry enhances social engagement even amid core imitation challenges. This work underscores the potential of virtual collaborative environments to quantify and modulate dynamic interpersonal coordination, offering new avenues for both assessment and targeted therapeutic strategies.

Motor Function and Social Cognition in Schizophrenia publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in motor function and social cognition in schizophrenia across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Motor planning: Neural processes that organise and sequence muscle movements for goal-directed action.

Behavioural synchronisation: Spontaneous alignment of gestures, posture or speech rhythms between interaction partners.

Social cognition: Cognitive operations underlying perception, interpretation and response to social cues such as facial expressions and intentions.

Diadochokinetic speech: A measure of rapid, alternating speech movements, often used to assess motor control in articulation.

Virtual collaborative environment: Immersive digital setting where users interact with computer-generated agents or scenarios to simulate social and motor tasks.

References

1. Quirky conversations: how people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia do dialogue differently. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (2023).
2. Speech characteristics yield important clues about motor function: Speech variability in individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis. Schizophrenia (2023).
3. Motor Deficits in Schizophrenia Quantified by Nonlinear Analysis of Postural Sway. PLOS ONE (2012).
4. The cortical signature of impaired gesturing: Findings from schizophrenia. NeuroImage Clinical (2017).
5. Using mimicry of body movements by a virtual agent to increase synchronization behavior and rapport in individuals with schizophrenia. Scientific Reports (2018).
6. Using Virtual Reality as a Tool in the Rehabilitation of Movement Abnormalities in Schizophrenia. Frontiers in Psychology (2021).