Abstract
Cognitive memory and introspection disturbances are considered core features of schizophrenia. Moreover, it remains unclear whether or not participants with schizophrenia are more cognitively impaired with ageing than healthy participants. The aims of this study were to use a metacognitive approach to determine whether elderly participants with schizophrenia are able to improve their memory performance using a specific generation strategy and to evaluate the memory benefits for them using this strategy. 20 younger and 20 older participants with schizophrenia and their comparison participants matched for age, gender and education learned paired associates words with either reading or generation, rated judgment of learning (JOL) and performed cued recall. Participants with schizophrenia recalled fewer words than healthy comparison participants, but they benefited more from generation, and this difference was stable with ageing. Their JOL magnitude was lower than that of healthy comparison participants, but JOL accuracy was not affected by either age or the pathology. In spite of their memory deficit, elderly and younger participants with schizophrenia benefited remarkably from the memory generation strategy. This result gives some cause for optimism as to the possibility for participants with schizophrenia to reduce memory impairment if learning conditions lead them to encode deeply.
Highlights
Memory is acknowledged to be one of the cognitive functions most affected in schizophrenia [1,2,3,4] and cognitive disturbances are seen as better predictors of low functional outcome in participants with schizophrenia than clinical symptoms [5, 6]
The results show that memory performance was lower for both groups with schizophrenia than for both healthy groups
This finding is consistent with evidence which has repeatedly indicated that episodic memory is defective in schizophrenia [1, 37, 80,81,82,83]
Summary
Memory is acknowledged to be one of the cognitive functions most affected in schizophrenia [1,2,3,4] and cognitive disturbances are seen as better predictors of low functional outcome in participants with schizophrenia than clinical symptoms [5, 6]. Improving their memory abilities should increase their functional outcome, and even small gains in their functioning or productivity could translate into large financial savings [7]. Even if executive functions impairment in participants with schizophrenia does not fully account for their memory impairment [12], it leads them to compensate with cognitive resources [13] and usually generates poor semantic performance [14]
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