Keefe R S, Lees-Roitman S E, Dupre R L
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27710, USA.
Schizophr Res. 1997 Jul 25;26(1):9-14. doi: 10.1016/S0920-9964(97)00037-6.
Human and nonhuman primate data suggest that visuospatial working memory is mediated by a neural network that includes the prefrontal cortex. Simple working memory tasks are less complex than standard neuropsychological tests of frontal dysfunction. As such, they are less vulnerable to general performance factors such as amotivation and uncooperativeness in schizophrenic patients. These tasks thus hold promise as potential measures of frontal dysfunction in schizophrenia. However, the specific parameters of visuospatial working memory deficit in schizophrenia have not been established. This study assessed working memory functions in 18 schizophrenic patients and 28 controls using a pen-and-paper analogue of a monkey prefrontal cortex activation task. Schizophrenic patients and controls performed similarly on a sensory-guided task that did not require working memory functions, yet schizophrenic patients performed significantly worse than controls on tasks that required subjects to retain visuospatial information for delay periods of 10 and 20 s. These data suggest that the working memory deficits in patients with schizophrenia begin to appear less than 10 s following encoding of visuospatial information and that these working memory deficits can be assessed with easily administered pen-and-paper tasks.
人类和非人类灵长类动物的数据表明，视觉空间工作记忆由一个包括前额叶皮层的神经网络介导。简单的工作记忆任务比额叶功能障碍的标准神经心理学测试复杂度更低。因此，它们受诸如精神分裂症患者缺乏动机和不合作等一般表现因素的影响较小。这些任务因此有望成为精神分裂症中额叶功能障碍的潜在测量方法。然而，精神分裂症中视觉空间工作记忆缺陷的具体参数尚未确定。本研究使用一种类似于猴子前额叶皮层激活任务的纸笔测试，评估了18名精神分裂症患者和28名对照组的工作记忆功能。在一项不需要工作记忆功能的感觉引导任务中，精神分裂症患者和对照组表现相似，但在要求受试者在10秒和20秒延迟期内保留视觉空间信息的任务中，精神分裂症患者的表现明显比对照组差。这些数据表明，精神分裂症患者的工作记忆缺陷在视觉空间信息编码后不到10秒就开始出现，并且这些工作记忆缺陷可以通过易于实施的纸笔任务进行评估。
