Soriano, M. F. , Jimenez, J. F. , ROMÁN FERNÁNDEZ, PATRICIA ELENA, Bajo, M. T.
Si
Neuropsychology
Article
Científica
1.755
01/01/2009
000262209300006
2-s2.0-58749102811
Hallucinations have been recently associated with inhibitory deficits in memory. In this study, the authors investigated whether hallucinations were related to difficulties to inhibit irrelevant information from episodic memory (Experiment 1) and working memory (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, a directed forgetting task was used. This task measures participants' ability to intentionally forget some recently learned material, when instructions indicate that it is no longer relevant. In Experiment 2, an updating task was used. This task requires participants to intentionally suppress irrelevant information from working memory. Results showed that patients with schizophrenia with hallucinations presented inhibitory deficits in the directed forgetting task and an increase in the number of intrusions in the updating task, compared to patients without hallucinations and healthy controls. No correlations were found between indices of inhibition and other general, negative or positive symptoms. These findings support the existence of an association between intentional inhibition in memory and hallucinations, and they suggest that problems to suppress memory representations can underlie hallucinations in schizophrenia.
schizophrenia; inhibitory processes; directed forgetting; intrusions; hallucinations