It is well known that schizophrenics have difficulty in effectively encoding verbal materials into their long-term memories and consequently show a deficit in recall. Recently, orienting tasks were introduced as a method for achieving equivalent to normal encoding and mnemonic organization in schizophrenics; consequently, their deficit in recall disappeared. A detailed review of the literature, however, showed that such effective orienting tasks had only been applied to mildly disturbed schizophrenics (nonchronic, in a good condition). This report presents three experiments which show that more severely disturbed (chronic, hospitalized) schizophrenics, unlike mildly disturbed patients, have memory deficits that cannot be located at the encoding stage. Severely disturbed schizophrenics show (1) a recall deficit, even after effective encoding and mnemonic organization are induced; (2) excessive forgetting over 24- and 48-hour periods; and (3) a recognition memory deficit. These deficits are in addition to their encoding deficit. The use of a matched-tasks check in experiments 2 and 3 suggests that this postencoding deficit is a differential deficit and does not is a differential deficit and does not simply reflect the schizophrenic generalized deficit. Theoretical implications, also supported by the use of various organizational indices (e.g., clustering, hierarchical clustering schemes, and hierarchical grouping analysis), are discussed.

Matched verbal recall and recognition memory tasks were constructed in a pilot study with 70 firemen and were then used to assess the performance of 10 severely disturbed chronic, nondemented schizophrenics (aged 26–50 yrs) relative to a 2nd group of 35 firemen (aged 20–50 yrs). Patients performed better on recognition than on recall tasks, although they had a deficit on both. Because this differential deficit cannot be attributed to the schizophrenic generalized deficit, it supports the theory that schizophrenics have a chunking deficit at encoding. However, their poor memory performance on both tasks also supports the theory that chronic schizophrenics are characterized by a generally deteriorated memory performance, in addition to their encoding deficit. (40 ref)

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This study uses matched tasks methodology, and shows that unipolar depressives perform better on recognition than on recall. Since they also show a low level of item clustering in free recall, this suggests that the memory deficit of depressives is partly due to an associative disturbance.