Patients with schizophrenia remember that an event has occurred, but not when.

Abstract

The context memory deficit hypothesis of schizophrenia postulates that the long-term deficit associated with this disorder is related to a memory impairment for contextual information. To test this hypothesis, memory for temporal context was assessed in 33 patients with schizophrenia and 33 normal subjects, using a recency discrimination task. Whereas patients were able to recall and recognise target items, they were unable to recognise from among the target items those which had been most recently learned. Schizophrenia is associated with a temporal context memory deficit.