Autobiographical and episodic memory deficits in schizophrenia: A narrative review and proposed agenda for research

Abstract

Schizophrenia is associated with memory disorders that affect patients in their daily life. Patients complain about difficulty to remember knowledge that has been recently learnt together with its context (episodic memory, EM) but also more complex events that have been personally experienced (autobiographical memory, AM). While deficits at both encoding and retrieval have been shown to account for EM disorders in schizophrenia, the cognitive mechanisms involved in AM disorders are more difficult to approach. This is partly explained by the conceptual difference between EM and AM. Some methodological limitations inherent to the AM research also reduce the possibility to investigate the early processing of complex and dynamic real-life events at encoding; rather the retrieval processes engaged have therefore been the focus of the bulk of extant research. The aim of this review is to summarize the main findings related to EM and AM research in patients with schizophrenia, to discuss the putative mechanisms that may account for patients' AM impairment, based in particular on the literature about EM, and to provide an agenda for future research aiming to further elucidate the role of encoding deficits in AM in patients.

Keywords: Autobiographical memory; Episodic memory; Event segmentation; Neurocognitive mechanism; Schizophrenia; Virtual reality.