Horan William P, Green Michael F, Knowlton Barbara J, Wynn Jonathan K, Mintz Jim, Nuechterlein Keith H
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Neuropsychology. 2008 Sep;22(5):606-17. doi: 10.1037/a0012602.
Schizophrenia patients consistently show deficits on tasks of explicit learning and memory. In contrast, their performance on implicit processing tasks often appears to be relatively intact, although most studies have focused on implicit learning of motor skills. This study evaluated implicit learning in 59 medicated schizophrenia outpatients and 43 controls using 2 different cognitive skill tasks. Participants completed a probabilistic classification task to assess procedural habit learning and an artificial grammar task to assess incidental learning of complex rule-based knowledge, as well as an explicit verbal learning and memory task. In addition to performing worse than controls on the explicit learning task, patients showed worse overall performance on the probabilistic classification task, which involves gradual learning through trial-by-trial performance feedback. However, patients and controls showed similar levels of learning on the artificial grammar task, suggesting a preserved ability to acquire complex rule-based knowledge in the absence of performance feedback. Discussion focuses on possible explanations for schizophrenia patients' poor probabilistic classification task performance.
精神分裂症患者在显性学习和记忆任务中始终表现出缺陷。相比之下，他们在隐性加工任务中的表现通常似乎相对完好，尽管大多数研究集中在运动技能的隐性学习上。本研究使用2种不同的认知技能任务评估了59名正在服药的精神分裂症门诊患者和43名对照者的隐性学习。参与者完成了一项概率分类任务以评估程序性习惯学习，以及一项人工语法任务以评估对基于复杂规则的知识的偶然学习，还有一项显性言语学习和记忆任务。除了在显性学习任务中表现比对照者差之外，患者在概率分类任务中的整体表现也更差，该任务涉及通过逐次试验的表现反馈进行渐进学习。然而，患者和对照者在人工语法任务上表现出相似的学习水平，这表明在没有表现反馈的情况下，他们获取基于复杂规则的知识的能力得以保留。讨论集中在对精神分裂症患者概率分类任务表现不佳的可能解释上。
