Schizophrenia patients are known to exhibit episodic verbal memory
deficits. Although their neural origin is debated, they have often been
compared to the memory problems found in temporal lobe amnesia or frontal
lobe dysfunction. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent such deficits
arise at either memory encoding or retrieval. We addressed the issue of
retrieval deficits in schizophrenia in a part-list cuing experiment,
testing the effect of the presentation of a subset of previously learned
material on the retrieval of the remaining items. The part-list cuing
procedure generally impairs retrieval but previous work showed that the
detrimental effects are more pronounced in amnesic participants than in
healthy people, indicating a retrieval deficit under part-list cuing
conditions in amnesia. In the present study, schizophrenia patients did
not exhibit increased susceptibility to part-list cuing effects and thus
showed no increased retrieval inhibition from part-list cuing. Moreover,
in part-list cuing, schizophrenia patients did not mirror the pattern
found in amnesia, demonstrating a dissociation between amnesia and
schizophrenia patients with respect to this particular memory effect.
Implications for the neural basis of the part-list cuing effect and of
memory disturbances in schizophrenia are discussed. (JINS, 2005,
11, 273–280.)