Reduced Capacity but Spared Precision and Maintenance of Working Memory Representations in Schizophrenia

Abstract

Working memory (WM) has been a major focus of recent schizophrenia research, driven by robust behavioral evidence of patient impairment and neuroimaging evidence suggesting abnormalities in neural activity during the performance of WM tasks.^1-4 The clinical literature has been motivated by basic cognitive science models suggesting that WM is a critical building block of many higher cognitive functions.^5,6 Further, there is extensive basic neuroscience literature suggesting that WM involves dopaminergic activity in the prefrontal cortex, and the known abnormalities in dopaminergic function in schizophrenia seem to be consistent with deficits in WM.^4,7-11 More recently, findings from postmortem neuropathological studies of patients with schizophrenia as well as genetic findings have implicated abnormalities in the neural circuitry involved in WM.^12-15