Marques Valéria R S, Spataro Pietro, Cestari Vincenzo, Sciarretta Antonio, Iannarelli Francesca, Rossi-Arnaud Clelia
a Department of Psychology , Sapienza University of Rome , Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Rome , Italy.
Cogn Neuropsychiatry. 2015;20(1):41-52. doi: 10.1080/13546805.2014.957380. Epub 2014 Sep 26.
Implicit memory tasks differ along two orthogonal dimensions, tapping the relative involvement of perceptual/conceptual and identification/production processes. Previous studies have documented a dissociation between perceptual (spared) and conceptual (impaired) implicit memory, using in the latter case a production task (category exemplar generation), in which there is high response competition during the retrieval phase. The present study sought to determine whether the perceptual/conceptual dissociation held when comparing two identification tasks, in which there is no response competition at retrieval.
In two experiments, repetition priming was assessed in 44 schizophrenic patients and 46 healthy controls in lexical decision (a test based on perceptual identification processes) and category verification (a test based on conceptual identification processes).
Schizophrenic patients achieved a priming as high as that of controls in the lexical decision task. In contrast, only controls exhibited significant priming in the category verification task.
It is concluded that schizophrenia is associated with a specific deficit in conceptual implicit memory, irrespective of the degree of response competition in the test phase.
内隐记忆任务在两个正交维度上存在差异，涉及感知/概念以及识别/生成过程的相对参与程度。先前的研究已经记录了感知性（保留）和概念性（受损）内隐记忆之间的分离，后者使用的是生成任务（类别范例生成），在该任务的检索阶段存在高度的反应竞争。本研究旨在确定在比较两个识别任务时，感知/概念分离是否依然存在，这两个识别任务在检索时不存在反应竞争。
在两项实验中，对44名精神分裂症患者和46名健康对照者进行了重复启动效应评估，评估任务包括词汇判断（基于感知识别过程的测试）和类别验证（基于概念识别过程的测试）。
在词汇判断任务中，精神分裂症患者获得了与对照组一样高的启动效应。相比之下，只有对照组在类别验证任务中表现出显著的启动效应。
得出的结论是，精神分裂症与概念性内隐记忆的特定缺陷有关，而与测试阶段的反应竞争程度无关。
