Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg, Clinique Psychiatrique, Hôpital Civil, 1 Place de l'Hôpital, 67091 Strasbourg Cedex, France.
Schizophr Res. 2011 May;128(1-3):156-60. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2011.02.008. Epub 2011 Mar 6.
Patients with schizophrenia exhibit a wide range of cognitive deficits, including autobiographical memory impairment. It has been suggested that there is a link between this impairment and a disorganization of autobiographical knowledge. This study aimed to explore both the elementary and conceptual organization of autobiographical memory in schizophrenia.
We used an event-cueing procedure to obtain and compare ten chains of six inter-related autobiographical memories of eighteen patients with schizophrenia and seventeen control participants. Elementary organization, which relies on memories' basic characteristics, including sensory-perceptive, cognitive, affective and temporal ones, was assessed by calculating the degree of similarity of the memories' characteristics within chains. Cluster-type connectivity, a form of conceptual organization reflecting the ability to organize autobiographical information about sets of causally and thematically related events, was assessed by asking the participants to describe the type of relationship between cued and cueing autobiographical memories.
Whereas in controls elementary organization of memories relied on sensory-perceptive and cognitive characteristics of the memories, in patients it was mostly based on the memories' emotional content. Temporal organization and conceptual organization appeared to be preserved in patients.
Patients fail to use sensory-perceptive and cognitive characteristics of memories to organize autobiographical knowledge. Possibly to compensate for this, they rely more on the memories' emotional characteristics. Our results point towards an imbalance between emotional and non-emotional factors underlying the organization of autobiographical memory in schizophrenia.
精神分裂症患者表现出广泛的认知缺陷，包括自传体记忆损伤。有人认为这种损伤与自传体知识的紊乱有关。本研究旨在探讨精神分裂症患者自传体记忆的基本和概念组织。
我们使用事件提示程序，获取并比较了 18 名精神分裂症患者和 17 名对照参与者的 10 个由 6 个相互关联的自传体记忆组成的链。基本组织依赖于记忆的基本特征，包括感觉知觉、认知、情感和时间特征，通过计算链内记忆特征的相似程度来评估。聚类型连接，反映组织关于因果和主题相关事件集的自传体信息的能力的一种概念组织形式，通过要求参与者描述提示和提示自传体记忆之间的关系类型来评估。
在对照组中，记忆的基本组织依赖于记忆的感觉知觉和认知特征，而在患者中，它主要基于记忆的情感内容。时间组织和概念组织在患者中似乎得到了保留。
患者无法使用记忆的感觉知觉和认知特征来组织自传体知识。为了弥补这一点，他们更多地依赖于记忆的情感特征。我们的研究结果表明，在精神分裂症患者自传体记忆的组织中，情感和非情感因素之间存在不平衡。
