Atypical meta-memory evaluation strategy in schizophrenia patients

Yunxuan Zheng; Lei Wang; D Jacob Gerlofs; Wei Duan; Xinyi Wang; Jia Yin; Chao Yan; Mélissa C Allé; Fabrice Berna; Jijun Wang; Yingying Tang; Sze Chai Kwok

doi:10.1016/j.scog.2021.100220

Atypical meta-memory evaluation strategy in schizophrenia patients

Schizophr Res Cogn. 2021 Oct 6:27:100220. doi: 10.1016/j.scog.2021.100220. eCollection 2022 Mar.

Authors

Yunxuan Zheng^{1

2

3}, Lei Wang¹, D Jacob Gerlofs⁴, Wei Duan¹, Xinyi Wang¹, Jia Yin⁵, Chao Yan¹, Mélissa C Allé⁶, Fabrice Berna⁷, Jijun Wang^{8

9

10}, Yingying Tang⁸, Sze Chai Kwok^{1

2

11}

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics, Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, Affiliated Mental Health Center (ECNU), School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
² Division of Natural and Applied Sciences, Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, Jiangsu, China.
³ School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
⁵ Department of Neurosurgery, Tenth People's Hospital of Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
⁶ Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193 - SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, F-59000 Lille, France.
⁷ University Hospital of Strasbourg - Department of Psychiatry, University of Strasbourg, INSERM U1114, FMTS, France.
⁸ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Psychotic Disorders, Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
⁹ CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology (CEBSIT), Chinese Academy of Science, China.
¹⁰ Institute of Psychology and Behavioral Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
¹¹ Shanghai Changning Mental Health Center, Shanghai, China.

Abstract

Background: Previous research has reported that patients with schizophrenia would regard false memories with higher confidence, and this meta-memory deficit was suggested as a neurocognitive marker of schizophrenia. However, how schizophrenia patients determine their memory decision confidence has received scant consideration. This study, therefore, aimed to characterize the extent to which meta-memory evaluation strategy differs between schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals, and how such difference contributes to the patients' meta-memory performance.

Methods: 27 schizophrenia patients and 28 matched healthy controls performed a temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task, in which they judged which movie frame occurred earlier in an encoded video, and then made retrospective confidence rating. Mixed effect regression models were performed to assess the between-group metacognitive evaluation strategy difference and its relationship to clinical symptoms.

Results: Compared to the control group, the patients' confidence ratings were correlated more with the recent confidence history and less with the TOJ-related evidence. The degree of dependence on recent history of confidence was negatively correlated with the severity of positive symptoms. Furthermore, by controlling for the first-order TOJ performance, we observed that the patients discriminated correct memory decisions from the incorrect ones as accurately as the controls.

Conclusion: The present investigation revealed that schizophrenia patients tend to use more heuristics in making meta-memory evaluations, and such atypical strategy is related to their clinical symptoms. This study provides new insights into how schizophrenia patients perform meta-memory processes. Future research could consider examining such metacognitive deficits in light of other cognitive domains in psychosis.

Keywords: Confidence; False memory; Meta-memory; Schizophrenia; Serial dependence.