PROVIDENCE – A new Brown University study pinpoints working memory as a source of learning difficulties in people with schizophrenia.
Working memory is known to be affected in the millions of people — about 1 percent of the population — who have schizophrenia, but it has been unclear whether that has a specific role in making learning more difficult, said Anne Collins, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and lead author of the study.
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“We really tend to think of learning as a unitary, single process, but really it is not,” said Collins, who in 2012 along with co-author Michael Frank, associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences, developed an experimental task and a computational model of cognition that can distinguish the contributions of working memory and reinforcement in the learning process.
They found that only working memory was a source of impairment. Working memory is often referred to as short-term memory, but in addition to holding different kinds of information, it includes the management of that information, according to Wikipedia.
