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Location:Home>Research>Research Progress
 
Research Demonstrates the Neural Correlates of Prospective Memory Impairments in Schizophrenia Patients
 
Author: Prof. CHAN Raymond      Update time: 2015/10/08
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Prospective memory (PM) is an ability to remember to perform actions at a particular moment in the future and is important for daily life, e.g., remembering to appear in a dating or attend a meeting. Empirical findings show that patients with schizophrenia demonstrate PM impairments. However, no studies examined the neural mechanism of PM in schizophrenia. Drs. CHAN Raymond, WANG Ya and the team from the Institute of Psychology have conducted an imaging study to address this gap by examining the neural activations during anevent-based PM task in 22schizophrenia patients and 25 matched healthy controls. Findings showed that schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse than healthy controls. They showed decreased activations in the prefrontal cortex (including the superior frontal gyrus, Brodmann area 10), anterior cingulatedgyrus, precuneus, parahippocampus, and putaman. Results suggested that attention control and allocation, future intention encoding and maintenance and motivational factors may underlie the PM impairments in schizophrenia. Moreover, these brain areas do not work independently, but serve as a network, mainly in the frontal-parietal and cingulo-opercular networks. This study provides empirical evidence on the underlying neural mechanism of PM impairments in schizophrenia. These findings may also provide guidance on the intervention of PM impairments in schizophrenia.

This study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation of China, Youth Innovation Promotion Association Funding of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Programme for Creative Research Team.

The paper is now available online in Neuropsychology.

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