Errorless learning and memory performance in schizophrenia

Abstract

There is evidence that patients with schizophrenia have impaired explicit memory and intact implicit memory. The present study sought to replicate and extend that of O'Carroll et al. [O'Carroll, R.E., Russell, H.H., Lawrie, S.M. and Johnstone, E.C., 1999. Errorless learning and the cognitive rehabilitation of memory-impaired schizophrenic patients. Psychological Medicine 29, 105-112.] which reported that for memory-impaired patients with schizophrenia performance on a (cued) word recall task is enhanced using errorless learning techniques (in which errors are prevented during learning) compared to errorful learning (the traditional trial-and-error approach). Thirty patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia and fifteen healthy controls (HC) participated. The Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test was administered and from their scores, the schizophrenic patients were classified as either memory-impaired (MIS), or memory-unimpaired (MUS). During the training phase two lists of words were learned separately, one using the errorless learning approach and the other using an errorful approach. Subjects were then tested for their recall of the words using cued recall. After errorful learning training, performance on word recall for the MIS group was impaired compared to the MUS and HC groups. However, after errorless learning training, no significant differences in performance were found between the three groups. Errorless learning may play an important role in remediation of cognitive deficits for patients with schizophrenia.

Attention to Irrelevant Cues Is Related to Positive Symptoms in Schizophrenia

“…Consistent with this, the correlation of positive symptom severity with nonpredictive cue scores was significantly greater than with predictive cues in experiment 2. A preferential increase in the attention to irrelevant cues represents an inefficient form of learning in schizophrenia36,37 and is an important precursor to the formation of delusions in some theories of psychosis, which view delusions as learned associations between unrelated events 21,23. Other research has also found that people with psychosis, and delusions in particular, learn to respond faster to irrelevant or nonreinforced stimuli in reaction-time tasks 38–40.…”

Errorless learning of everyday tasks in people with dementia

“…Since then, EL has been used in interventions aimed at memory and executive deficits resulting from, among other causes, traumatic brain injury, Korsakoff’s syndrome, stroke, or schizophrenia,4,9–15 as well as in elderly populations with mild, moderate, and severe memory disorders (ie, dementia) 4. Grandmaison and Simard16 reviewed various memory stimulation and remediation programs for persons with Alzheimer’s disease and found the interventions that incorporated EL to be effective.…”

Errorless learning and working memory: The impact of errors, distractors, and memory span load on immediate recall in healthy adults

“…However, Evans and colleagues (2000) reported an advantage of EL for ABI patients only in some of their experiments. Other studies have found a beneficial effect of EL for persons diagnosed with schizophrenia (Kern et al, 2009;Mulholland, O'Donoghue, Meenagh, & Rushe, 2008; The advantage of EL has mainly been explained by mnemonic mechanisms related to long-term memory, both for clinical populations (Baddeley & Wilson, 1994;Hunkin et al, 1998;Kessels & de Haan, 2003a;Page et al, 2006) and for healthy adults (Anderson & Craik, 2006;Kessels et al, 2005). However, these explanations do not fully clarify why EL sometimes is the beneficial learning approach and at other times is not, both within the same population and across clinical diagnoses where the basic mnemonic mechanisms ought to be similar.…”