Background
Susceptibility to item-specific proactive interference (PI) contributes to interindividual
differences in working memory (WM) capacity and complex cognition relying on WM. Although
WM deficits are a well-recognized impairment in schizophrenia, the underlying pathophysiological
effects on specific WM control functions, such as the ability to resist item-specific
PI, remain unknown. Moreover, opposing hypotheses on increased versus reduced PI susceptibility
in schizophrenia are both justifiable by the extant literature.
Methods
To provide first insights into the behavioral and neural correlates of PI-related
WM control in schizophrenia, a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment was
conducted in a sample of 20 patients and 20 well-matched control subjects. Demands
on item-specific PI were experimentally manipulated in a recent-probes task (three
runs, 64 trials each) requiring subjects to encode and maintain a set of four target
items per trial.
Results
Compared with healthy control subjects, schizophrenia patients showed a significantly
reduced PI susceptibility in both accuracy and latency measures. Notably, reduced
PI susceptibility in schizophrenia was not associated with overall WM impairments
and thus constituted an independent phenomenon. In addition, PI-related activations
in inferior frontal gyrus and anterior insula, typically assumed to support PI resistance,
were reduced in schizophrenia, thus ruling out increased neural efforts as a potential
cause of the patients’ reduced PI susceptibility.
Conclusions
The present study provides first evidence for a diminished vulnerability of schizophrenia
patients to item-specific PI, which is presumably a consequence of the patients’ more
efficient clearing of previously relevant WM traces and the accordingly reduced likelihood
for item-specific PI to occur.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 21, 2014
Accepted:
March 11,
2014
Received in revised form:
March 7,
2014
Received:
August 15,
2013
Identification
Copyright
© 2014 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
