The relationship between working memory capacity and broad measures of cognitive ability in healthy adults and people with schizophrenia.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Working memory (WM) capacity, typically measured with cognitively complex span tasks, is correlated with higher order cognitive abilities in healthy adults. The goals of this study were to determine whether a more focused measure of visual WM storage capacity would show similar higher order ability correlations in healthy adults and in people with schizophrenia (PSZ), thereby demonstrating the importance of simple storage capacity; determine whether the illness alters the pattern of correlations across cognitive domains; and evaluate whether between-groups differences in WM capacity could account for the generalized cognitive impairment in PSZ.

Method

Ninety-nine PSZ and 77 healthy controls (HCs) completed a visual WM change-localization task, the Wechsler Abbrevia

SUBMITTER: Johnson MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3746349 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature