Affiliations 

  • 1 Université Paris 8, Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Neuropsychologie, EA 2027, 2 rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis Cedex, France; University Malaya, Psychological Medicine Department, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Electronic address: lale.merlet@yahoo.fr
  • 2 Université Paris 8, Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Neuropsychologie, EA 2027, 2 rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis Cedex, France; Université François-Rabelais, UMR-CNRS 7295, CeRCA, Tours, France
  • 3 Université Paris 8, Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Neuropsychologie, EA 2027, 2 rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis Cedex, France
  • 4 University Malaya, Psychological Medicine Department, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Psychiatry Res, 2014 Dec 30;220(3):752-9.
PMID: 25240943 DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2014.08.034

Abstract

Schizophrenia is associated with severe episodic retrieval impairment. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility that schizophrenia patients could improve their familiarity and/or recollection processes by manipulating the semantic coherence of to-be-learned stimuli and using deep encoding. Twelve schizophrenia patients and 12 healthy controls of comparable age, gender, and educational level undertook an associative recognition memory task. The stimuli consisted of pairs of words that were either related or unrelated to a given semantic category. The process dissociation procedure was used to calculate the estimates of familiarity and recollection processes. Both groups showed enhanced memory performances for semantically related words. However, in healthy controls, semantic relatedness led to enhanced recollection, while in schizophrenia patients, it induced enhanced familiarity. The familiarity estimates for related words were comparable in both groups, indicating that familiarity could be used as a compensatory mechanism in schizophrenia patients.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.