Impaired associative inference in the early stage of psychosis

Relational memory is impaired in chronic schizophrenia. It is unclear if similar deficits are already present in the early stage of psychosis. We used the Associative Inference Paradigm to test relational memory ability in the early stage of a non-affective psychotic disorder. Eighty-two early stage psychosis patients and 67 healthy control subjects were trained on 3 sets of 30 paired associates: H-F1 (house paired with face), H-F2 (same house paired with new face), F3-F4 (two new faces). Subjects who reached 80% recall accuracy of the paired associates during training were then tested for their ability to recall the previously seen pairs and solve a novel, inferential pairing F1-F2 (faces linked through association to same house).

Source: Schizophrenia Research - June 26, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Kristan Armstrong, Suzanne Avery, Jenni U. Blackford, Neil Woodward, Stephan Heckers Source Type: research