The Culprit Of Schizophrenia: Working Memory May Be Responsible

Recent findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience show that working memory may be responsible for learning difficulties in people with schizophrenia--a potentially debilitating mental illnesses that's estimated to affect roughly 1 percent of the population. However, up until now, it's been relatively unclear what the cause-and-effect relationship has been between the two factors.

"We really tend to think of learning as a unitary, single process, but really it is not," said lead study author Anne Collins of Brown University, in a news release. "We thought we could try to disentangle that here and see if the impairment was in both aspects, or only one of them."

For the study, researchers compared 49 schizophrenia patients to 36 healthy volunteers. They discovered that those with the mental disorder scored significantly lower in working memory part of the experiment. However, no differences were found in reinforcement learning.

This latest research supports previous theories that working memory independently impairs learning in people with schizophrenia. Yet no associations were directly found between reinforcement and learning impairments in schizophrenics.

On another note, the findings also suggest that targeting reinforcement is also more successful in improving the ability to learn more about the health problem.

"More broadly it brings attention to the fact that we need to consider learning as a multiactor kind of behavior that can't be just summarized by a single sytem," Collins concluded. "It's important to design tasks that can separate them out so we can extract different sources of variance and correctly match them to different neural systems."