Exploring the sociodemographic, clinical and neuropsychological factors associated with relational memory in schizophrenia

ABSTRACT

Introduction

The Transverse Patterning (TP) task has been used to measure episodic relational memory (RM) deficits in clinical populations. Individuals with schizophrenia often fail to learn TP with standard, and sometimes extensive training. Identifying the differences between TP learners and non-learners can improve our understanding of successful TP performance and its underlying mechanisms, which may help improve interventions aimed at ameliorating RM performance. We investigated sociodemographic, clinical and neuropsychological factors associated with TP performance in schizophrenia.

Methods

Sixty-six participants with schizophrenia completed a semantically rich and a relational-binding dependent version of the TP task and reported on their task awareness and strategy use.

Results

Twenty-six participants failed to learn the task rules after extensive training. Learners had superior verbal, visual and working memory, executive functions and overall cognitive functioning compared to non-learners. Learners also had superior awareness of task rules and pairs relationships and used elaborated cognitive strategies more often.

Conclusions

Our results support previous findings that some individuals with schizophrenia show RM impairment even with extensive TP training. We shed light on neuropsychological and metacognitive factors associated with TP performance. This knowledge could enhance interventions targeted to improve relational memory in schizophrenia when extensive training fails.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychosis
• episodic memory
• cognition
• metacognition
• memory strategies

Disclosure statement

M.L. reports grants from Otsuka Lundbeck Alliance, personal fees from Otsuka Canada, personal fees from Lundbeck Canada, grants and personal fees from Janssen, and personal fees from MedAvante-Prophase, outside the submitted work. A.E.S. and J.D.R. have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [M.L.], upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Funds de Recherche en Santé du Québec [grant number 32855]. Martin Lepage holds a James McGill professorship from McGill University and a Research Chair from the Fonds de Recherche Québec –Santé. Jennifer Ryan holds funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [grant number PJT 162274]. Ana Elisa Sousa was partially supported by a Mitacs Graduate Scholarship. The funding sources were not involved in any part of the study.