Abstract
People with schizophrenia experience difficulties in remembering their past and envisioning their future. However, while alterations of event representation are well documented, little is known about how personal events are located and ordered in time. Using a think-aloud procedure, we investigated which strategies are used to determine the times of past and future events in 30 patients with schizophrenia and 30 control participants. We found that the direct access to temporal information of important events was preserved in patients with schizophrenia. However, when events were not directly located in time, patients less frequently used a combination of strategies and partly relied on different strategies to reconstruct or infer the times of past and future events. In particular, they used temporal landmark events and contextual details (e.g., about places, persons, or weather conditions) less frequently than controls to locate events in time. Furthermore, patients made more errors when they were asked to determine the temporal order of the past and future events that had been previously dated. Together, these findings shed new light on the mechanisms involved in locating and ordering personal events in past and future times and their alteration in schizophrenia.
Highlights
Patients with schizophrenia experience difficulties in remembering their past and imagining their future
Our results showed that patients directly accessed to the temporal location of important events as frequently as control participants
When events were not directly dated, patients with schizophrenia less frequently relied on a combination of strategies and used contextual details and temporal landmark events less frequently than control participants to reconstruct or infer the dates of personal events
Summary
Patients with schizophrenia experience difficulties in remembering their past and imagining their future. The present study aimed to examine whether processes involved in the temporal location and order of personal past and future events are altered in schizophrenia. Regarding non-personal events, Venneri et al.[20] showed that patients with schizophrenia make more dating errors and are less precise when they are asked to date historical events (for example, the fatal car accident of Princess Diana) These findings suggest that the dating of events might be (at least partly) altered in schizophrenia, none of these studies examined the mechanisms involved in the ability to locate events in time. It remains unclear whether the mechanisms underlying the temporal location of personal events are impaired in schizophrenia
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