High estradiol levels improve false memory rates and meta-memory in highly schizotypal women

Abstract

(2015) 'High estradiol levels improve false memory rates and meta-memory in highly schizotypal women.', Psychiatry research., 229 (3). pp. 708-714. Further information on publisher's website:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres. 2015.08.016 Publisher's copyright statement: NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Psychiatry Research. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be re ected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractOverconfidence in false memories is often found in patients with schizophrenia and healthy participants with high levels of schizotypy, indicating an impairment of meta-cognition within the memory domain. In general, cognitive control is suggested to be modulated by natural fluctuations in estrogen. However, whether estrogen exerts beneficial effects on metamemory has not yet been investigated. The present study sought to provide evidence that high levels of schizotypy are associated with increased false memory rates and overconfidence in false memories, and that these processes may be modulated by natural differences in estradiol levels. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, it was found that highly schizotypal participants with high estradiol produced significantly fewer false memories than those with low estradiol. No such difference was found within the low schizotypy participants. Highly schizotypal participants with high estradiol were also less confident in their false memories than those with low estradiol; low schizotypy participants with high estradiol were more confident. However, these differences only approached significance. These findings suggest that the beneficial effect of estradiol on memory and meta-memory observed in healthy participants is specific to highly schizotypal individuals and might be related to individual differences in baseline dopaminergic activity.

Positive Schizotypy Increases the Acceptance of Unpresented Materials in False Memory Tasks in Non-clinical Individuals

“…As we have already outlined in the introduction, in our view, this observation could reflect a general Type I error bias similar to that observed in studies of pattern identification, in which individuals with positive traits have been shown to be more prone to identify objects in noisy stimuli (Blackmore and Moore, 1994;Brugger and Graves, 1997). As for the disorganized dimension, one study had observed a positive association between this dimension and false memory (Saunders et al, 2012), whereas other studies failed to identify a significant relation between them (Dagnall and Parker, 2009;Sugimori et al, 2011;Kanemoto et al, 2013;Hodgetts et al, 2015). Our analyses showed significant correlations between disorganized traits and confidence ratings mirroring the results obtained in relation to the positive dimension, which is unsurprising given the significant degree of correlation between the scores in these two dimensions shown in our data and, consistently, in previous studies (Fonseca-Pedrero et al, 2015.…”

“…Scale used Design Relation with false memory rates Dimension measured between these two variables. Regarding the disorganized dimension, only one study has indicated a positive association with false memories (Saunders et al, 2012), with other four showing null associations (Dagnall and Parker, 2009;Sugimori et al, 2011;Kanemoto et al, 2013;Hodgetts et al, 2015).…”

The Importance of Metamemory Functioning to the Pathogenesis of Psychosis

“…Information can either be verbal (word recognition) or visual (picture recognition) in nature. However, the verbal paradigm has been implemented more often (Laws and Bhatt, 2005; Bhatt et al, 2010; Moritz et al, 2014b; Eifler et al, 2015; Eisenacher et al, 2015; Hodgetts et al, 2015). In this version, participants are usually asked to encode lists of words which are strongly associated with a not presented lure or “theme” word.…”

“…No association was identified between accuracy of memory and delusion proneness measures. A third study by Hodgetts et al (2015) also aimed at understanding metamemory processes in healthy people with high vs. low levels of schizotypy. The authors found that estradiol had a beneficial effect on metamemory processes which was specific to participants with high schizotypy scores.…”

“…Therefore, this review focuses on CL ratings as a measure of metamemory ability. CL ratings have been assessed in a variety of tasks, for example verbal recognition tasks (Kircher et al, 2007), verbal (Moritz et al, 2004; Laws and Bhatt, 2005; Bhatt et al, 2010; Eifler et al, 2015; Eisenacher et al, 2015; Hodgetts et al, 2015) or visual (Moritz et al, 2008; Peters et al, 2012, 2013) false memory tasks, source monitoring tasks (Moritz and Woodward, 2002, 2006a,b; Moritz et al, 2003, 2005; Doré et al, 2007; Garcia et al, 2012) or general knowledge tasks (Bacon et al, 2001). …”