The Relational Trip Task, a novel ecological measure of relational memory: data from a schizophrenia sample

Exploring the sociodemographic, clinical and neuropsychological factors associated with relational memory in schizophrenia

INTRODUCTION

The Transverse Patterning (TP) task has been used to measure episodic relational memory (RM) deficits in clinical populations. Individuals with schizophrenia often fail to learn TP with standard, and sometimes extensive training. Identifying the differences between TP learners and non-learners can improve our understanding of successful TP performance and its underlying mechanisms, which may help improve interventions aimed at ameliorating RM performance. We investigated sociodemographic, clinical and neuropsychological factors associated with TP performance in schizophrenia.

METHODS

Sixty-six participants with schizophrenia completed a semantically rich and a relational-binding dependent version of the TP task and reported on their task awareness and strategy use.

RESULTS

Twenty-six participants failed to learn the task rules after extensive training. Learners had superior verbal, visual and working memory, executive functions and overall cognitive functioning compared to non-learners. Learners also had superior awareness of task rules and pairs relationships and used elaborated cognitive strategies more often.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results support previous findings that some individuals with schizophrenia show RM impairment even with extensive TP training. We shed light on neuropsychological and metacognitive factors associated with TP performance. This knowledge could enhance interventions targeted to improve relational memory in schizophrenia when extensive training fails.

Episodic Memory and Schizophrenia: From Characterization of Relational Memory Impairments to Neuroimaging Biomarkers

Episodic memory research in schizophrenia has a long history already which has clearly established significant impairments and strong associations with brain measures and functional outcome. The purpose of this chapter is not to make an exhaustive review of the recent literature but to highlight some relatively recent developments in the cognitive neuroscience field of episodic memory and schizophrenia. Hence, we present a contemporary view focusing specifically of relational memory which represents a form of episodic memory that refers to associations or binding among items or elements presented together. We describe the major tasks used and illustrate how their combination with brain imaging has: (1) favored the use of experimental memory tasks to isolate specific processes with specific neural correlates, (2) led to a distributed view of the neural correlates of memory impairments in schizophrenia where multiple regions are contributing, and (3) made possible the identification of fMRI biomarkers specific to episodic memory. We then briefly propose what we see as the next steps for memory research in schizophrenia so that the impact of this work can be maximized.