Relational memory in psychotic bipolar disorder
Bipolar Disorders, 07/27/2012
Clinical Article
Sheffield JM et al. – The authors found that patients with psychotic bipolar disorder had better relational memory performance than schizophrenia patients, indicating that a history of psychotic symptoms does not lead to a significant relational memory deficit.
Methods- The authors tested 25 patients with psychotic bipolar disorder on a relational memory paradigm previously employed to quantify deficits in schizophrenia.
- During the training, participants learned to associate a set of faces and background scenes.
- During the testing, participants viewed a single background overlaid by three trained faces and were asked to recall the matching face, which was either present (Match trials) or absent (Non-Match trials).
- Explicit recognition and eye-movement data were collected and compared to those for 28 schizophrenia patients and 27 healthy subjects from a previously published dataset.
- Contrary to the prediction, the authors found psychotic bipolar disorder patients were less impaired in relational memory than schizophrenia subjects.
- Bipolar disorder subjects showed eye-movement behavior similar to healthy controls, whereas schizophrenia subjects were impaired relative to both groups.
- However, bipolar disorder patients with current delusions and/or hallucinations were more impaired than bipolar disorder patients not currently experiencing these symptoms.
