A new research by the Brown University states that learning problems schizophrenia patients might be because of working memory.
People suffering from schizophrenia, a mental illness that affects 1 percent of Americans, face learning disabilities. But, no cause and effect relationship was found. "We really tend to think of learning as a unitary, single process, but really it is not," lead researcher Anne Collins of Brown University said in a press release.
Collins along with co-researcher Professor Michael Frank developed an experimental task and a statistical model to distinguish two processes, working memory and reinforcement in the learning processes. "We thought we could try to disentangle that here and see if the impairment was in both aspects or in only one of them," Collins said.
The duo compared 49 schizophrenia patients to 36 healthy volunteers and found that scores on working part of the memory were much lower. However, the researchers found no difference in reinforcement learning.
According to the researchers, the findings support the hypothesis that working memory alone damages learning in schizophrenics. However, no associations were found between reinforcement and learning impairments in schizophrenia patients. The study further showed that targeting reinforcement is more favourable in improving the ability to learn in people with schizophrenia.
"More broadly it brings attention to the fact that we need to consider learning as a multiactor kind of behavior that can't be just summarized by a single sytem," Collins said. "It's important to design tasks that can separate them out so we can extract different sources of variance and correctly match them to different neural systems."
The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
