A comparison of memory for verbal and non-verbal material in schizophrenia

Seeing is remembering: Do deficits in closure affect visual memory recognition in schizophrenia?

“…Because this Pr correlated significantly with performance on the delayed free recall task at the ROCFT (Meyer & Meyer, 1995), it can be assumed that our task has good construct validity in measuring visual memory. The group difference of Pr is indicative of an episodic visual memory deficit and follows other studies also showing such deficit with visual material (Kline, Smith, & Ellis, 1992;Tracy et al, 2001;Whittaker, Deakin, & Tomenson, 2001). Because memorisation was mostly independent from any conceptual meaning or verbalisation, the impaired encoding or memory system was though to rely essentially on visual processing.…”

Recognition of Visual Stimuli and Memory for Spatial Context in Schizophrenic Patients and Healthy Volunteers

“…These results are compatible with those of Rushe et al (1999) who observed no interaction between diagnosis and verbal versus non-verbal long-term memory. On the other hand, Tracy et al (2001) found that schizophrenic patients were more impaired on visual than verbal recognition, compared to normative data. However, their visual task involved non-meaningful designs that may have been more difficult to encode than the pictures presented in our task, whereas their verbal task could benefit from semantic clustering, which made it easier than ours.…”

“…In schizophrenia research, the few studies which have addressed the issue of the role of type of material in the memory deficit have yielded conflicting results (Rushe, Woodruff, 1094 GILDAS BRÉBION ET AL. Murray, & Morris, 1999;Toulopoulou et al, 2003;Tracy et al, 2001). Investigations of visual memory in schizophrenic patients have most often used tasks derived from standard neuropsychological batteries.…”

Amygdala–hippocampal shape and cortical thickness abnormalities in first-episode schizophrenia and mania

“…Unlike the amygdala shape abnormalities, shape deformities in the hippocampal tail were restricted to FES patients alone. As the posterior hippocampus supports memory retrieval in humans and allows for the conscious recall of information (Eichenbaum, 2000), the observed shape abnormalities in the hippocampal tail, together with known hippocampal reductions in schizophrenia, may underlie memory impairments in schizophrenia (Tracy et al 2001). This may explain the greater impairments in verbal memory (Altshuler et al 2004) and facial memory (Hill et al 2009) tasks in schizophrenia compared with bipolar disorder in addition to reported deficits in hippocampal activation during a memory task in patients with schizophrenia compared with bipolar disorder (Hall et al 2010).…”