Working Memory Deficits in Schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia have besides their core symptoms also deficits in the cognitive domain. Patients with schizophrenia are impaired on working memory tasks.

In this post I will start with a discussion of this.

In their review, Park and Goodale (2014) discussed that impairments in working memory, especially concerning encoding and maintenance, are found in a lot of patients with schizophrenia. Furthermore, they stated that the working memory impairments could be a stable trait marker in this patient population, which was to be found to be allready evident in the prodromal phase in addition to the chronic stages of this disorder. In addition, they reported support for the hypothesis that these impairments are genetically transmitted, because these impairments were also found in unaffected relatives.