Lack of false recognition in schizophrenia: a consequence of poor memory?

The tendency to falsely recognize items as ones previously presented is increased in patients with frontal lesions and in older participants, whereas patients with medial temporal lobe damage may display such poor memory that they are not especially susceptible to false recognition. Since patients with schizophrenia are often compared to these groups neurocognitively, we explored the extent to which they are more susceptible to false memory. Participants were presented with word lists along a semantic theme, such as “bread”. After list presentation, recognition tasks were administered which contained both the studied words as well as unstudied words. Some of the unstudied words were related to the theme of the previously studied words, but never actually presented (e.g. semantic “lures”). In a separate test, free recall of these lists of words was assessed. Interestingly, it was control participants who made more errors at recall, and were especially susceptible to intrusions of the semantic lures. Patients with schizophrenia did not make more false recognition errors in general, and surprisingly they made disproportionately fewer false recognition errors to semantic lures specifically. We conclude that despite poor memory, patients with schizophrenia are not especially susceptible to interference from previous tasks and are not particularly prone to false recollections.