Schizophrenia patients may underestimate their memory performance, according to a study conducted by Chien-Yeh Chiu of National Taiwan University in Taipei and colleagues.
Researchers assessed Feeling-of-Knowing (FOK) ability of 40 schizophrenia patients and 40 demographically matched normal controls through a recall-judgment-recognition task involving common Chinese word pairs. In a learning phase, participants were presented with 26 word pairs and told they would be asked to recall the target words later.
In a second phase, participants were asked to recall the target words and assess their FOK judgments. In a third phase, participants were presented with 20 targets and 20 distracters, and were asked to recognize whether each word had been learned in the learning phase. Researchers measured FOK accuracy by estimating the association between FOK judgment and correctness of recognition.
Schizophrenia patients as a group had less FOK than their normal counterparts, but their FOK ability varied, with 42.5% of patients exhibiting a below chance level performance. Patient self-reports of cognitive capacity should be treated “with caution,” the authors noted.
“Because patients with schizophrenia tend to underestimate their performance in upcoming memory tasks, they are more likely to prematurely terminate their memory searches,” they wrote. “Cognitive remediation programs to counteract this tendency may improve memory function, and routine neuropsychological assessment, including evaluation of metamemory function, should be helpful.”
Read the article in Psychiatry Research (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2015.09.046).