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)