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Spatial working memory task validation in a group of patients with schizophrenia and healthy volunteers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2014

D Piskulic ,
J Olver ,
K Monshat ,
T Norman  and
P Maruff
D Piskulic
Affiliation:
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Austin Health
J Olver
Affiliation:
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Austin Health
K Monshat
Affiliation:
Austin Health
T Norman
Affiliation:
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Austin Health
P Maruff
Affiliation:
CogState Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
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Abstract

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Type
Abstracts from ‘Brainwaves’— The Australasian Society for Psychiatric Research Annual Meeting 2006, 6–8 December, Sydney, Australia
Information
Acta Neuropsychiatrica , Volume 18 , Issue 6 , December 2006 , pp. 303
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Blackwell Munksgaard

Background:

It is now agreed that cognitive deficit is an important aspect of the clinical presentation of schizophrenia. One parsimonious brain-behaviour model with good explanatory power for both animal and human models of the disorder is that of impairment of working memory (WM). Patients with schizophrenia show a reliable decrement of WM, which has been proposed to give rise to social and employment disabilities. The aim of the current study was to validate a computer-based behavioural spatial WM test in patients with schizophrenia.

Methods:

A novel spatial WM test based on the ‘n-back’ paradigm was used to compare 15 medicated patients with schizophrenia against 15 healthy volunteers. The task involved remembering the position of a target card from an arrangement of between two and four cards presented in a radial configuration, with instructions to determine whether the card that was face up at the time of presentation was in the same location as a card that had turned face up on the previous trial (1-back condition) or two previous trials (2-back condition). All subjects were retested a week later to determine the stability and reliability of the test.

Results:

Repeated-measures ANOVA showed that patients with schizophrenia performed worse than healthy controls on tests of spatial WM.

Conclusions:

The behavioural n-back task proved to be a quick and reliable measure of spatial WM in patients with schizophrenia. Our data further support previous findings of spatial WM deficits in schizophrenia.