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Prospective Memory Impairment in Schizophrenia

The three papers examined prospective memory (PM) impairment in schizophrenia, with findings indicating that deficits are primary rather than secondary. Paper 1 highlighted significant performance issues in PM tasks due to problems in cue detection and intention retrieval, while Paper 2 focused on symptomatically remitted male patients showing selective deficits in intention retrieval. Overall, the studies suggest that PM impairment is prevalent in schizophrenia, and combining behavioral methods with ERP or fMRI could yield more definitive results for treatment strategies.

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11 views2 pages

Prospective Memory Impairment in Schizophrenia

The three papers examined prospective memory (PM) impairment in schizophrenia, with findings indicating that deficits are primary rather than secondary. Paper 1 highlighted significant performance issues in PM tasks due to problems in cue detection and intention retrieval, while Paper 2 focused on symptomatically remitted male patients showing selective deficits in intention retrieval. Overall, the studies suggest that PM impairment is prevalent in schizophrenia, and combining behavioral methods with ERP or fMRI could yield more definitive results for treatment strategies.

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Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
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All the three papers explored the PM impairment in patients diagnosed with

schizophrenia, with paper 2 focusing on symptomatically remitted male schizophrenic

patients. all the behavioral tasks of three studies showed the PM deficit is a primary deficit

rather than a secondary one.

Paper 1 found that schizophrenic patients performed significantly poorly on all subtypes

of PM tasks and that impairment arising from problems in the cue detection and intention

retrieval stages, which are core characteristics of PM and required self-initiation process that

involve prefrontal lobe function (Burgess et al., 2001, 2003; den Ouden et al., 2005)

The nature and magnitude of this impairment is fully explained in paper 3 via fMRI due

to mainly hypoactivation of prefrontal cortex esp. (BA10) area that play a crucial role in the

storage and self-initiation of PM intentions. Other brain areas showed activation abnormities

and clarified the impairments in attention control and allocations, future intention encoding

and maintenance, as well as motivations as explained above in paper 3.

Paper 2 by using ERPs demonstrated that PM deficit in symptomatically remitted male

schizophrenic patients characterized by a selective deficit in retrospective component

(intention retrieval) of PM (reduction only in the amplitude of prospective positivity

amplitude component but N300 is reliable that link to cue detection component). That is

distinct from acute episode of schizophrenia patients in paper 1 characterized by impairments

in both cue detection and intention retrieval.

Although paper 1used event and time-based PM tasks, as compared to paper 2 and paper

3 which only used event-based PM tasks. The results of time-based PM task could have been

explained better using ERPs or fMRIs. However, since only the event-based PM task was

involved in the paper 2 and paper 3, it is difficult to determine whether or not results should

be generalized to include the time-based PM. Especially Ordemann et al. (2014) suggests that
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prospective memory assignments cannot be considered as similar ones because of the

enormous difference in time- and event-based PM.

Paper 1 and paper 3 used a combination of male and female patients but none investigated

potential sex differences with respect to the disorder itself. Paper 2 used only male as

symptomatically remitted patients which makes it unclear whether or not the results should

be generalized to include females as well. Ochoa et al. (2012) presupposes the importance of

gender in several aspects of schizophrenia.

Paper 2 and paper 3 used a considerably small sample size as compared to paper 1, which

could have confounded the results.

Together, all three research papers contributed to find that PM impairment was

generally impaired in patients with schizophrenia and/or symptomatically remitted

schizophrenic patients. However, using only behavioral methods couldn’t give as significant

results as using ERP or fMRI. This suggested a combination of these methods could be used

in the current research to get more concrete results. This review allows clinicians to

understand the intricacies of PM with regards to schizophrenia to devices proper treatment

management and strategies.

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