Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Schizophrenia is a chronic psychiatric illness that typically emerges in late adolescence/early adulthood and costs an estimated $7 billion Canadian dollars each year. Although major improvements have been made towards the treatment of certain symptoms associated with schizophrenia (e.g., hallucinations), other areas including cognition remain negatively impacted. Of particular importance in schizophrenia are memory impairments for every day, real life events. The study of real life, every day memory, however, has posed a major obstacle to researchers in that they have been unable to determine the veracity of patients' personal memories. Consequently, it is possible that researchers to date have been studying accounts of events that are only loosely based on reality. In the proposed study, we will assess memory for real life events in a virtual reality environment, in which we are able to control each aspect of the participants' experiences. Virtual reality has proven its usefulness in the treatment of anxiety disorders as well as in the investigation of spatial memory, and is well suited to studying memory for real life events. By furthering our understanding of how patients with schizophrenia remember the events they experience, I plan to inform the design of new treatment strategies or early intervention programs to ensure that patients feel a consistent sense of self, improving their functioning in the real world.