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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access published online on May 21, 2009
Schizophrenia Bulletin, doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp039
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Reinforcement Ambiguity and Novelty Do Not Account for Transitive Inference Deficits in Schizophrenia

Michael J. Coleman2, Debra Titone3, Olga Krastoshevsky2, Verena Krause2, Zhuying Huang4, Nancy R. Mendell4, Howard Eichenbaum5 and Deborah L. Levy1,2
2 Psychology Research Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA 02478
3 Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
4 Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
5 Department of Psychology, Boston University, Boston, MA

1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 617-855-2854, fax: 617-855-2778, e-mail: dlevy{at}mclean.harvard.edu.

The capacity for transitive inference (TI), a form of relational memory organization, is impaired in schizophrenia patients. In order to disambiguate deficits in TI from the effects of ambiguous reinforcement history and novelty, 28 schizophrenia and 20 nonpsychiatric control subjects were tested on newly developed TI and non-TI tasks that were matched on these 2 variables. Schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse than controls on the TI task but were able to make equivalently difficult nontransitive judgments as well as controls. Neither novelty nor reinforcement ambiguity accounted for the selective deficit of the patients on the TI task. These findings implicate a disturbance in relational memory organization, likely subserved by hippocampal dysfunction, in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.

Keywords: relational memory / difficulty / hippocampus


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