Can Memory-related Introspection Help Patients with Schizophrenia Improve Their Learning Efficiency?

Abstract

Introduction

Cognitive deficits are today considered as core symptoms of schizophrenia. The most classical techniques aimed at enhancing learning and retention focus on repetition of learning, and are not very efficient on a long time scale. On the other hand, the subjective knowledge and feelings about memory provide the basis for regulating one's memory-related behavior. Metamemory refers to the subjective awareness of one's memory capacity (monitoring), and the control of the related memory behavior. The self monitoring approachis based on having learners judge which material have been learned or not well learned. It has been successfully used to enhance learning in young and older healthy participants. Monitoring ability has been shown to be relatively spared in schizophrenia.

Aims

The aim of this study was to assess the efficiency in patients with schizophrenia of this potential learning method, self-monitoring, including a single learning session, in comparison with relearning.

Methods

After a single word pair encoding phase (60 pairs), patients took part in a single session devoted to either re-study, or self-monitoring. The strength of the cue-target association was manipulated. 48 hours later, there was a final cued-recall test.

Results

Preliminary results show that, regarding difficult material, most of the patients having used the self-monitoring procedure had better levels of performance (8/10: performance > 50%) than those having re-studied (3/9: performance > 50%).

Conclusions

If the results are confirmed with greater patient's samples, then self-monitoring could represent an interesting and novel, less stressful learning strategy for patients with schizophrenia.