Mnemonic organization in young nonpsychotic schizophrenics.

Describes 2 experiments with 18-27 yr old nonpsychotic schizophrenics (n = 32), nonschizophrenic psychiatric patients (n = 112), and nonhospitalized normals (n = 32). In Exp. I, Ss were given repeated free-recall trials of 20 "unrelated" words and of 20 categorized words. The schizophrenics' recall and mnemonic organization, as indexed by measures of subjective organization, categorical clustering, and hierarchical clustering schemes, were both inferior to those of the normals and, to some extent, to those of the nonschizophrenics. While the normals and nonschizophrenics tended to build up higher-order mnemonic units with trials, this trend was weak in the schizophrenics. In Exp. II, nonpsychotic schizophrenics and normals engaged in repeated recognition tasks of 40 words and 40 consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams. The recognition memory of the schizophrenics was the same as that of the normals, in spite of contextual variations of the study and test lists. Results are interpreted on the basis of the 2-process theory of recall as supporting the view that the basic deficit of schizophrenia in mnemonic processing is a difficulty in unitizing the material. (36 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition versus recall in schizophrenia.

Twenty-four schizophrenic and 24 normal Ss, 8 in each group being overinclusive and 16 non-overinclusive, were presented with two 20-word lists, one for free recall and one for recognition. The recognition alternatives were rhymes, synonyms, and synonym-rhymes of the various target words. Schizophrenics were poorer than normals in recall but not in recognition, and the ratio of recall over recognition was significantly greater for schizophrenics than for normals. The results of an analysis of the recognition errors suggested that the recall deficit of schizophrenics may be due to an inability to organize information for retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Schizophrenic short-term memory: The role of organization at input.

Investigated schizophrenics' ability to utilize input organization and auditory cues for recall. 32 7-letter lists, varying in degree of organization, were presented to 24 schizophrenic and 24 normal Ss for forced-order recall. 1/2 of the lists were vocalized aloud, the remainder articulated silently. Normals gave significantly better recall than schizophrenics, and voicing facilitated recall in both groups. Schizophrenics had greater difficulty in recalling items in the last serial positions than did normals. Schizophrenics' omissions increased monotonically with serial position, while the omissions of normals followed the serial position curve. Findings suggest that schizophrenics do utilize the cues of input organization and vocalization for recall, but the process of responding seems to engender excessive output interference which makes retrieval of late input items difficult. (35 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mnemonic organization and free recall in schizophrenia.

Investigated word-storage structure and processes of organization and retrieval in 17 young schizophrenics (mean age 26.5 yrs) and 13 normal Ss (mean age 25.7 yrs). Ss were required to establish a stable organization of 25 unrelated words through repeated, self-paced sortings into self-determined categories. Subsequently, they were asked for free recall of the words. The schizophrenics required significantly more trials to complete the sorting task, but once this was achieved they recalled as many words in equally regular order as the normals did. The groups did not differ in regard to organizational structure in the sortings as assessed by hierarchical structure analysis. It is concluded that a schizophrenic deficit of mnemonic organization is indicated, possibly due to difficulties in maintaining a stable system of categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of categorization and imagery on recognition and recall by process and reactive schizophrenics.

Imagery and categorization were orthogonally varied in an assessment of recognition and recall of 16 process schizophrenics (process group), 16 reactive schizophrenics (reactive group), and 16 controls (student group). Schizophrenic Ss were selected from the inpatient population at Bellevue Hospital, and "students" were volunteers who had all received a bachelor's degree. For all groups, recognition was uninfluenced by categorization but was directly related to imagery. For the student and reactive groups, recall was directly related both to categorization and to imagery. For the process group, however, neither variable influenced recall. In addition, the student group had higher intertrial repetition scores than the reactive group, which had higher scores than the process group. Taken together, findings suggest that the process schizophrenic's inabiity to retrieve information from memory is related to faulty mnemonic organization of to-be-remembered materials. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the phenomena of "opposite speech."

"It is the purpose of this paper to consider 'opposite speech' within the categories of a theory of the development of cognition—a theory concerned with general, formal properties of cognitive activity, obtaining in phylogenesis, ontogenesis, cultural evolution, psychopathology, etc. The fundamental principle of this comparative developmental approach to cognition is that wherever development occurs, it proceeds from a relatively global and undifferentiated state to one of increasing differentiation, articulation, and integration… ." Several lines of evidence are cited. Two relevant experiments are discussed. They suggest "that the processes underlying 'opposite speech' occur not only in a few schizophrenics employing a strange means to avoid anxiety or to express hostility, but may be found in any individual, characteristically or momentarily operating under conditions conducive to a primitivization of the level of symbolic articulation and organization of experience." 28 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Residual performance deficit in clinically remitted schizophrenics: A marker of schizophrenia?

The study of remitted schizophrenic outpatients is proposed as a way of minimizing the effects of the "nuisance variables" that confound the study of hospitalized schizophrenics. 20 hospitalized acutely disturbed schizophrenics (mean age, 37.0 yrs), 20 schizophrenic outpatients in clinical remission (mean age, 42.8 yrs) and 20 normal controls (mean age, 35.1 yrs) were administered a span of apprehension test and the Continuous Performance Test (CPT). All Ss were controlled for sex and WAIS scores and schizophrenics were rated with Phillips Prognostic Rating Scale. On the CPT, both acute and remitted schizophrenics made significantly more errors of omission and commission than did the normal controls. On the span of apprehension, both groups of schizophrenics showed a significantly greater decrement in accuracy of detection of the target stimuli than did normal controls. The same pattern of results has been observed in children at risk for schizophrenia, which suggests that the span of apprehension may be sensitive to core schizophrenic processes that are independent of clinical state. The cross-sectional study of the 3 stages of schizophrenia—the premorbid, acute, and remitted—is proposed as a way of identifying "core" schizophrenic processes and markers of vulnerability to schizophrenia. The adequacy of a general "attentional impairment" interpretation of schizophrenic deficit is questioned. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of retrieval in schizophrenic memory deficit.

To distinguish between information that is unavailable or inaccessible in the schizophrenic's memory store, 48 schizophrenics and 48 normals learned 3 lists of categorized words. The lists were either cued or not cued at recall. Demographic and pretest measures validated the diagnosis of schizophrenia and indicated no significant differences between the experimental groups on age, education, intelligence, or categorizing ability. Results indicate that under conditions where the input did not exceed the limits of immediate memory span, schizophrenic memory deficit could be explained in terms of an "inaccessibility" of items due to a retrieval dysfunction. Under conditions where input exceeded these limits, the recall analysis was suggestive of an "unavailability" of items in the memory store. It is concluded that schizophrenics suffer deficits throughout the information processing system rather than at any specific stage. The locus of breakdown was dependent on the task demands of the experimental situation. (French summary) (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Organization in memory: A comparison of psychotics and normals.

15 acute schizophrenics, 11 acute psychotic depressives, and 15 normal Ss completed a multitrial free-recall task. The 30 to-be-remembered nouns from 6 conceptual categories were printed, 1 on each card. During self-paced presentation, the nouns were sorted into S-determined categories. Patient recall was inferior. The extent to which successive categorizations of the words during sorting were similar and reflected norms of category membership was measured. No significant group differences were realized. Patient recall clustering, defined both by norms of category membership and subjective sorting categorizations, was inferior. On no measure did schizophrenics and depressives differ. Results indicate that with lists of relatively high semantic content, the recall impairment displayed by schizophrenics and depressives stems mainly from an inability to completely use perceived structuring of the list during recall. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The organization of judgements based on positive and negative adjectives in the Bannister-Fransella Grid Test

This study compared the level of organization of judgements involving evaluatively positive (E+) adjectives such as kind with that of judgements involving evaluatively negative (E-) adjectives such as stupid in the Bannister-Fransella Grid Test. The grids of 275 subjects, including 43 normals, 24 thought-disordered schizophrenics, 30 non-thought-disordered schizophrenics, 50 "mixed" schizophrenics, 18 depressives, 16 neurotics, and 94 undiagnosed new admissions were examined. The organization of judgements based on E+ ones across all ten groups. These results are inconsistent with the "null hypothesis" that the grids of thought-disordered schizophrenics contain only random "error variance" since they reveal a source of systematic variation in the grids of thought-disordered schizophrenics as well as those of other populations. These data were discussed also in relation to the hypothesis that comparative judgements involving E- adjectives are more difficult than those involving E+ ones.     

Relation of formal thought disorder to the communication deficit in schizophrenics.

Evaluated 40 schizophrenics and 20 normals on a social communication task and on an individual cognitive task, both designed to reveal decentering deficits. It was hypothesized that the processes underlying the schizophrenic's thought disorder are formally similar to the processes involved in his deviant organization of social situations, specifically social communication, with both deficits to be interpreted in terms of faulty decentering. Schizophrenics manifested a decentering deficit on both the social communication (p     

Encoding of taxonomic word categories by schizophrenics

Administered to 20 chronic, undifferentiated schizophrenics and 20 paranoid schizophrenic controls the release-from-proactive-interference procedure as developed by D. D. Wickens. Word triads representing 8 conceptual categories were the to-be-remembered stimuli. Proactive interference release was clearly established for both schizophrenic subgroups. These findings are interpreted to imply that chronic, undifferentiated schizophrenics as well as paranoid schizophrenics encode the attributes of conceptual word class in memory. Previous failures of chronic schizophrenics to benefit from categorized to-be-remembered materials in recall tests are probably not the result of an encoding deficiency. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration of linguistic ideas in schizophrenics.

S. D. Koh and R. A. Peterson (1978) found that requiring semantic encoding at acquisition facilitated recall for schizophrenics in the same way that it does for normals. It was hypothesized that more complex forms of semantic organization would reveal a deficit in schizophrenics, but not for all subtypes. The paradigm used, developed by J. D. Bransford and J. J. Franks (1971), involves an incidental sentence recognition task in which Ss are presented interrelated parts of a complex idea in acquisition and subsequently tested for their memory of new and old (previously seen) instances of the idea. In the present study, with 56 hospitalized male veterans and 14 college students, normals' and nonpsychotics' patterns of recognition responses reflected the organization of this complex idea, even when they had actually never seen the specific test sentences. All schizophrenics were found to be capable of distinguishing sentences that violated the relations within the complex ideas from those that did not, but only the good premorbid acute patients' responses reflected the integration of part ideas. Poor premorbid acute patients showed an intermediate level of integrating semantic information, and chronic patients were unable to use the interrelations within ideas to organize their memories. (1? p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recall and recognition in chronic nondemented schizophrenics: Use of matched tasks.

Matched verbal recall and recognition memory tasks were constructed in a pilot study with 70 firemen and were then used to assess the performance of 10 severely disturbed chronic, nondemented schizophrenics (aged 26–50 yrs) relative to a 2nd group of 35 firemen (aged 20–50 yrs). Patients performed better on recognition than on recall tasks, although they had a deficit on both. Because this differential deficit cannot be attributed to the schizophrenic generalized deficit, it supports the theory that schizophrenics have a chunking deficit at encoding. However, their poor memory performance on both tasks also supports the theory that chronic schizophrenics are characterized by a generally deteriorated memory performance, in addition to their encoding deficit. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual contact with reality in schizophrenia.

"It was hypothesized that under experimental conditions involving minimal distance cues, schizophrenics in poor contact would manifest less size constancy than either schizophrenics in good contact or normals. Three groups of subjects, schizophrenics in good contact with reality, schizophrenics in poor contact, and normals, were tested in a size-constancy experiment under three different distance cue conditions, maximal, minimal, and no cue. The results of the investigation supported the hypothesis. This was interpreted as suggesting that the schizophrenic's break with reality involves not only more complex psychological functions, but basic perceptual processes as well." 20 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Schizophrenic recall and contextual constraint.

Compared the effects of contextual constraint and list length on short-term recall of word lists by 24 chronic schizophrenics (aged 23-62 yrs) and 120 normal males (prison inmates and firemen). One subtest consisting of relatively short lists of low constraint and 1 subtest consisting of longer lists of high constraint were matched on mean, variance, and shape of the distribution of item difficulties, variance of subtest scores, shape of the distribution of subtest scores, and subtest reliability. These psychometrically matched subtests were used to compute a difference score of accuracy on low-constraint lists minus accuracy on high-constraint lists. On this difference score, schizophrenics scored lower than normals with the same total accuracy scores. The direction of this difference was opposite to that found in 4 previous studies of the effects of contextual constraint on recall by schizophrenics. It is concluded that the findings of the previous studies are probably artifacts of the use of unmatched tasks and that schizophrenic deficit in recall is not increased more by an increase in contextual constraint than by a shortening of word lists. In fact, the data suggest that precisely the opposite may be true. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serial recall by schizophrenic and affective patients during and after psychotic episodes.

Eight schizophrenics (mean age 27.3 yrs), 8 depressed patients (mean age 33.1 yrs), and 8 normal controls (mean age 27 yrs) completed the MMPI and were asked to recall short word strings in both the presence and absence of distraction. Results show a differential cognitive deficit among schizophrenics both before and after a general improvement in their level of adjustment. That is, despite an overall improvement in their accuracy of recall prior to discharge, their performance continued to be impaired relative to depressed and normal Ss on the words presented in the 1st serial position. A tendency toward greater distractibility among schizophrenics failed to reach statistical significance at both points of assessment. Further substantiation of such stable forms of cognitive impairment may facilitate the identification of individuals who are vulnerable to the development of schizophrenia and may shed light on the adjustment problems that many chronic patients continue to experience after discharge from the hospital. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Production of associative sequences in process-reactive schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic groups.

A previous study (Judson & Katahn, 1960) disclosed significant differences between process-reactive schizophrenics in the recall of friends' names over a 10-minute interval. The differences were greater than would have been expected from their recall of animal names and IQ scores. This was interpreted as reflecting a special restriction in interpersonal relationships in a generally impoverished relationship with the environment. The present study sought to extend the findings and employed both schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic patients. Both the process-reactive dimension and diagnostic category made significant independent and interacting contributions to the recall of friends' names, that is, the material with social connotations, but not to the recall of animal names. By subgroups, the rank order of recall from least to greatest, was process schizophrenics, process nonschizophrenics, reactive schizophrenics, reactive nonschizophrenics. The process-reactive distinction thus proved meaningful for nonschizophrenic as well as schizophrenic patients on this material. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sentence perception and distractibility in schizophrenic, manic, and depressed patients.

Previous research with schizophrenics suggested that distraction may have its primary effect on controlled information processing. To explore this hypothesis, 8 schizophrenics, 8 manics, 8 depressives, and 8 normal Ss (all Ss were aged 18–45 yrs) were asked to shadow short stories in both the presence and absence of a competing message and to answer questions afterward about the content of the shadowed message. The shadowing performance of all 3 patient groups was equivalent to that of normal Ss and was not affected by distraction. Shadowing errors of commission indicated that schizophrenics did use semantic and syntactic information to anticipate words in the relevant message, but the schizophrenics also inserted more semantically irrelevant words than any of the other 3 groups. Distraction did interfere with the schizophrenics' ability to recall the content of relevant passages, but not with the performance of the other 3 groups. Data indicate that distraction may have a specific rather than general influence on controlled information processing or that distraction may reduce schizophrenics' overall capacity to handle information in short-term memory. The analysis of shadowing errors suggested that performance on such laboratory tasks may be closely related to the verbal communication problems encountered by many schizophrenic patients, but also that these symptoms may not be a simple function of selective attention difficulties. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Priming effects in schizophrenia: Associative interference and facilitation as a function of visual context.

Irrelevant stimuli that flank a fixated target may cause either facilitation or interference with target classification. 20 schizophrenic patients, 20 depressed control patients, and 20 normal control Ss were compared on a flanker priming task that involved the linear display of a target surrounded by 2 flanking letters or digits. Choice reaction time (RT) between letter and digit targets was examined as a function of flanker condition and onset asynchrony between flankers and target. Facilitative priming occurred only with prior exposure of flankers compatible with the response required and was greater in degree with schizophrenic and depressed than with normal Ss. Interference from flankers incompatible with the response required occurred less among schizophrenics than among other groups. Several different processes may be involved in the inhibition of irrelevant information by schizophrenics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)