Metamemory with ageing in schizophrenia: a first study

Metacognitive preserved generation strategy benefits for both younger and elderly participants with schizophrenia

Cognitive memory and introspection disturbances are considered core features of schizophrenia. Moreover, it remains unclear whether or not participants with schizophrenia are more cognitively impaired with ageing than healthy participants. The aims of this study were to use a metacognitive approach to determine whether elderly participants with schizophrenia are able to improve their memory performance using a specific generation strategy and to evaluate the memory benefits for them using this strategy. 20 younger and 20 older participants with schizophrenia and their comparison participants matched for age, gender and education learned paired associates words with either reading or generation, rated judgment of learning (JOL) and performed cued recall. Participants with schizophrenia recalled fewer words than healthy comparison participants, but they benefited more from generation, and this difference was stable with ageing. Their JOL magnitude was lower than that of healthy comparison participants, but JOL accuracy was not affected by either age or the pathology. In spite of their memory deficit, elderly and younger participants with schizophrenia benefited remarkably from the memory generation strategy. This result gives some cause for optimism as to the possibility for participants with schizophrenia to reduce memory impairment if learning conditions lead them to encode deeply.

Does aging affect source monitoring and cognitive confidence in schizophrenia? Preliminary results

This study tested the influence of aging on source-monitoring and cognitive confidence deficits in schizophrenia. Younger (n=13) and older (n=10) schizophrenia patients were compared with younger (n=17) and older (n=10) healthy controls in the source-monitoring task. These preliminary results suggest that age negatively influences old/new item recognition, but not source monitoring, in both groups. Age has a negative impact on subjective confidence, but no interaction between group and age was found.