Neural Mechanisms of Memory Impairment in Schizophrenia: A Comparison with Frontal Lobe Lesion Patients
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1
McMaster University, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, Canada
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2
University of Toronto, Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, Canada
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3
University of Toronto, Departments of Medicine and Psychology, Canada
Background: Memory impairment in schizophrenia (SCZ) is hypothesized to be mediated, at least in part, by frontal lobe (FTL) dysfunction. This hypothesis was tested by utilizing a word list learning task (Stuss et al., 1994) to compare recall in patients with SCZ and focal FTL lesions. Methods: Recall was evaluated across patients with SCZ, FTL lesions (left frontal—LF, right frontal—RF, and bifrontal—BF), and controls. All participants were administered four successive trials of three word lists with varying organizational structure (blocked, scrambled, and unrelated) and asked to recall items following each trial.
Results: For immediate free recall, patients with SCZ initially performed worse than RF patients and better than LF/BF patients. However, as trials progressed SCZ patients equaled or surpassed RF patients, with LF/BF patients lagging well behind. Similar patterns were observed for secondary memory and some measures of organization strategy. Further, each group generally performed best on the blocked list and worst on the unrelated list. Conclusions: SCZ patients may possess an attenuated left-lateralized pathology relative to LF patients. Alternately, SCZ patients may only appear to have left-lateralized pathology because the verbal nature of this task necessitated that patients draw on cognitive resources from the left hemisphere.
Conference:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes, Toronto, Canada, 22 Mar - 26 Mar, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Psychiatric
Citation:
Patrick
R,
Christensen
B,
Stuss
D and
Zipursky
R
(2010). Neural Mechanisms of Memory Impairment in Schizophrenia: A Comparison with Frontal Lobe Lesion Patients.
Conference Abstract:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.14.00165
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Received:
01 Jul 2010;
Published Online:
01 Jul 2010.
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Correspondence:
R E Patrick, McMaster University, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, Hamilton, Canada, patricre@mcmaster.ca