Research has shown that schizophrenia patients are less able to identify a situation's abstract features (goals) than its concrete features (actions). However, it has been unclear whether this differential deficit represents a cognitive dysfunction or a lack of familiarity with many situations because of impoverished social experiences. Twenty-nine inpatients with DSM-III-R diagnosis of schizophrenia completed the Situational Feature Recognition Test, Version 2 (SFRT-2). The SFRT-2 included familiar and unfamiliar situations of which subjects were asked to identify characteristic goals and actions. A 2 x 2 x 2 analysis of variance (group by feature abstraction by situational familiarity) found a significant three-way interaction. Post-hoc analyses suggested that patients were better able to recognize concrete features in familiar situations. Differences in discriminating power of the four conditions of the SFRT-2 had been diminished on standardization and cross-validation groups. Therefore, the differential deficits shown by the patient sample probably do not represent psychometric confound. Implications for remediation of social cognitive deficits are discussed.

Preservation librarian Randy Silverman makes the case for preserving hardcopy newspapers in the digital age. He faults the U.S. Newspaper Program that resulted in copying and destroying original historic newspapers while converting 60 million pages to microfilm, and he argues for the maintenance of the originals to support historical research.

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