Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Individuals with Schizophrenia often subjectively report having a poor memory. Indeed, memory difficulties are considered a core cognitive deficit in Schizophrenia, which is strongly linked to functional outcome. This study aims to learn more about memory in Schizophrenia. In previous studies, effortful and automatic processes of memory have been shown to differ in people of varying ages. We chose to investigate effortful and automatic memory in patients with Schizophrenia using a previously validated experimental paradigm that pits one type of memory against the other. In the paradigm, participants will be shown a series of words on a computer screen, which will be repeated 1, 2 or 3 times. During part II, they will be exposed to words via audiotape- that is, they will hear the words. In the testing phase, participants will be shown words and be asked to identify the words that they heard, but not those that they had seen. Individuals without a deficit in effortful processing will be able to use the repeated words in Phase I to help decide whether it was heard or seen. Individuals with a deficit in effortful processing will recognize that the repeated word seems familiar, but will be unable to recall why. Thus, they will falsely identify a repeated, seen word as a word that was heard. We anticipate that patients with Schizophrenia will show a deficit in effortful learning, but relatively spared automatic processes. If this is the case, our findings could have implications for treatment options for memory deficits in Schizophrenia.