Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 July 2008, Pages 18-25
Biological Psychiatry

Review
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Function and Dysfunction in Schizophrenia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.04.011Get rights and content

Patients with schizophrenia have pronounced deficits in memory for events—episodic memory. These deficits severely affect patients' quality of life and functional outcome, and current medications have only a modest effect, making episodic memory an important domain for translational development of clinical trial paradigms. The current article provides a brief review of the significant progress that cognitive neuroscience has made in understanding basic mechanisms of episodic memory formation and retrieval that were presented and discussed at the first CNTRICS (Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia) meeting in Washington, D.C. During that meeting a collaborative decision was made that measures of item-specific and relational memory were the most promising constructs for immediate translational development. A brief summary of research on episodic memory in schizophrenia is presented to provide a context for investigating item-specific and relational memory processes. Candidate brain regions are also discussed.

Section snippets

Overview of Mechanisms of Long-Term Memory

The ability to successfully remember a prior event is the outcome of a complex set of processes that occur at different times. During the initial experience of an event, encoding processes play a critical role in determining the content and subsequent accessibility of an event (Figure 1A). Encoding of an episode will typically involve a complex combination of perception, conceptual processing, and action. However, these events usually do not occur in a vacuum—instead, in healthy individuals,

Cognitive Neuroscience of Episodic Memory

A great deal of information has been gleaned about the neural underpinnings of memory processing through studies of patients with brain damage and through functional neuroimaging studies of healthy participants. Much of this research has focused on the contributions of regions in the MTL and in the PFC. As we will describe in the following text, this research might provide the context for understanding the specific abnormalities in long-term memory mechanisms in schizophrenia.

The importance of

Long-Term Memory Dysfunction in Schizophrenia

Although a range of cognitive and information-processing deficits have been consistently observed in schizophrenia, a meta-analysis of neuropsychological studies found that the largest effect sizes for cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia are for verbal learning and memory (3). This suggests that there might be a more severe deficit in learning and memory against a background of less-severe generalized cognitive dysfunction (68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73). This memory impairment is not accounted for

Directions for Treatment Development

The CNTRICS workgroup agreed that, on the basis of the strong evidence from basic neuroscience and psychology research, research on memory in schizophrenia should consider differentiating between measures of item-specific memory (i.e., memory for individual stimuli irrespective of contemporaneously presented context or elements) and measures of relational memory (i.e., memory for stimuli/elements and how they were associated with coincident context, stimuli, or events). There is good reason to

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