Understanding and translating Working Memory Deficits in Schizophrenia
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Understanding and translating Working Memory Deficits in Schizophrenia - a study using EEG
IRAS ID
158481
Contact name
Corinna Haenschel
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
City University London
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 11 months, 26 days
Research summary
Even when they are not experiencing acute psychiatric symptoms people living with Schizophrenia have problems in everyday life and social interactions. Working Memory (WM) is the ability to hold and manipulate information for brief periods of time and is critically important for performing virtually all everyday tasks. Impairment of WM is a common feature of schizophrenia that is linked to problems of daily life. We have recently shown that many of these problems may start when encoding things into WM. The study aims to delineate the degree to which impairments in WM encoding result from attenuated initial visual representations in early visual areas or reduced enhancement of these representations attributable to reduced feedback from higher cognitive brain areas. This will be investigated by examining sensory gain control (the process of amplifying or attenuating neural activity to optimize task performance). In two experiments we want to examine whether deficits in sensory gain control lead to abnormalities in forming the initial stimulus representation (Exp.1) and preserving/enhancing such representations via feedback processes from higher cognitive brain areas (Exp.2).
To understand the brain processes underlying these problems brain activity will be recorded from 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 matched controls with no indications of colour blindness (using the Colour Assessment & Diagnosis test & Acuity-Plus Test) using Electroencephalography (EEG). EEG allows us to accurately identify the timing and coordination of activity related to working memory across different areas of the brain and its impairments in schizophrenia. This is important as complex mental processes are dependent on precisely coordinating activity across a variety of areas of the brain, and a breakdown in this coordination has been theorized to explain many of the problems exhibited by patients with schizophrenia. The aim is to provide the basis for developing a behavioural training programme to improve WM.REC name
London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/LO/1535
Date of REC Opinion
21 Oct 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion