BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Personality Disorders
This article is part of the Research TopicCognitive impairments in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression: Dissecting common and divergent featuresView all 15 articles
Language-based inference generation under working memory load: The role of schizotypal traits in jumping to conclusions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, IN, United States
- 2The University of Oklahoma - Tulsa, Tulsa, United States
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Individuals with schizophrenia often exhibit language abnormalities and Theory of Mind (ToM) impairments, potentially linked to cognitive processes such as jumping to conclusions (JTC) and disruptions in circular inference. Whether similar patterns emerge in healthy individuals with non-clinical schizotypal traits remains unclear. This study examined JTC through inference generation and its association with schizotypal traits. A total of 532 participants completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire–Brief Revised (SPQ-BR) and were audio-recorded while narrating a nine-frame comic strip, with a between-subjects working memory (WM) manipulation used to assess cognitive load. Speech transcripts were manually annotated by independent raters. WM load reliably increased the number of inferred events produced, whereas schizotypal traits alone were not significantly associated with inferred events. Instead, WM load moderated this relationship, such that disorganized traits predicted more inferred events only under WM load. For visual events, disorganized traits showed a quadratic association, and WM load again moderated this pattern, with quadratic effects present only when WM load was absent. Overall, WM load played a central role in shaping how disorganized schizotypal traits related to both inferred and visual event production. These findings suggest that JTC tendencies can emerge in the absence of clinical symptoms and highlight the value of speech-based methods for studying inference generation.
Keywords: Schizophrenia, theory of mind (ToM), speech production, circular inference, disorganized schizotypal traits, Probabilistic inference
Received: 05 Jul 2025; Accepted: 09 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Newman, Gann, Sandlin, Xiong and Bui. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sharlene D. Newman
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