Research Paper on Effects of Schizophrenia on Working Memory

Introduction

Many are the disorders that adversely affect the correct functionality of the mind of human being or memory. The onset of these disorders often commences simplistically with the manifestation of progressive degeneration of the capacity to think. In fact, many cases under review show that memory disordered patients' exhibit "normal" condition in the onset of such illness to the extent that people would think they are normal. One of the memory disorders is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a condition that assumes a chronic and severe mental deterioration which affect how a person feels, think and behaves. Ideally, individuals with schizophrenia often look like they have lost touch with reality. Working memory, on the other hand, refers to the cognitive system which has a limited capacity responsible for reasoning as well as playing a guiding role in decision making and behavior. Since schizophrenia is a disorder of the mind, it is possible to assert that it has adverse impacts on reasoning and functionality of the working memory rendering the victims to exhibit a change in behavior. This paper seeks to review existing research on the effects of schizophrenia on working memory; on the same note, it also proposes research on the state of intermediate long-term memory and long-term memory on what happens to them in case of schizophrenia.

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Research Hypothesis

In 2012, Cohens designed research to dissect memory disorders that were pertinent to degeneration of peoples thinking ability; this research became the hallmark into the study of mind concerning memory illnesses. More specifically, the findings intrigued myriads of memory disorders; it undertook to find more about schizophrenia and its impacts on working memory.

Literature Review

Eckfeld et al., (2017) studied the impacts of schizophrenia on working memory among adolescent. Their main aim was to unearth the reasons why the disorder was prevalent among younger generations and the state of their working memory during the attack. Further, they predicted that the disease must have had a severe impact on the totality of mind based on the individual behavioral observations they recorded. During their research, sample groups they were working with exhibited psychosis. This represented a decreased physical performance on working memory when compared to standard capacity and also translating to slim working memory ability in comparison to the healthy controls that were examined. Even though the visual term capacity of the clients was hypothesized to give four separate groups, the variability of the individual long-term ability of memory from the available information indicated that schizophrenia impacted negatively on the working memory of the different sample representatives. These results depicted insight research from which an association between a rational mind and neural dysfunction and the scanner neuro-cognitive performances were considered. Many findings realized that adolescent psychosis had working memory impairments in comparison to the controls showing the hypothesis of lower working memory capacity as well as decreased accuracy in the task at higher spatial loads. Additionally, adolescence psychosis showed deterioration in neural activity within working memory which was relevant to neural circuitry.

According to Zhang, Picchioni, Allen, and Toulopoulou (2016), it was possible for them to identify working memory deficit due to cognitive features of schizophrenia which arises from dysfunctional frontal and parietal cortices of the brain. In this research, the population that was studied were patients who have schizophrenia. The research involved analytical procedure of the patient's behavior concerning the coordination of their working memory (Zhang et al., 2016); the response accuracy and reaction time were taken as two indices of working memory performance. The evaluation initially took place on the outcome of the functional imaging studies evaluated. For this case, the ability to detect and replicate genetic effects based on the working memory has been showed to increase. The research investigated the familial inheritance of the condition casting the thought it was a liability of adopted hybrid brain for testing the hypothesis. In endeavoring to get the feedback, the search included the entire brain voxel which is a wise study which leads to 15 study sample investigation (Zhang et al., 2016) the findings revealed substantive evidence that the brain neurons worked to underpin various types of the working memory, for instance, the articulation of words and gesture representation may be different within the context of memory function. The results showed that, as compared to healthy control, the patients that were affected registered an increment in brain activation within the brain's prefrontal regions severed by schizophrenia.

In another study (Trapp, Dotterweich, Hintner, Wollny, Lautenbacher and Hajak 2017), sought to explain the behavioral and cognitive ability of schizophrenic patients. They posited that the patients were suffering from a wide range of consistent cognitive deficits which affects the duration and further cause of the disorder. In this context, the executive functioning responsible for various cognitive processes of a higher level is deemed to make an essential part in coordinating and controlling the basic operations the brain's functional outcome (Trapp et al., 2017). Considering a number of methods to find out the lasting effects of schizophrenia on working memory, the research employed different strategies that yielded evidence concurring with the existing research on the impacts of schizophrenia on working memory. This evidence posited that schizophrenia impairs memory and the effects can be found by use of a speed test with a relatively high working memory capacity (Trapp et al., 2017). The participants were given time concentrate if they could suffice to recall, decode and organize information.

To get the results, working memory in the participants was jogged by simple test to show if their memory could encode, manipulate, retrieve, while at the same time showing speed index for computation. The resulting outcome indicated that the time the participants took in encoding, retrieving and manipulating was inversely proportional to the average time that control samples took. Ideally, these results showed that schizophrenic conditions have profound effects on working memory.

According to Lawrie, 2014, schizophrenia reminisces different conditions which probably encompass many that affect extensively the mind people exemplifying features such as perception thought disruption, emotion, and behavioral change. This research, therefore, answers a current debate of whether the thought of brain alteration in the event schizophrenia sets in is just a form of generalization or not. In the quest to find out the reality, a series of analysis was carried out to examine the neurocognitive variables in schizophrenia. The neuro-cognitive deficit was instead found to be reliably associated with schizophrenia, and that deficit was present on most of the tasks discussed. In addition to the findings, the most notable outcome of the research was the impaired verbal articulation which is highly associated with schizophrenia (Ripke et al., 2013). This was the case in most of the schizophrenic conditions that were recorded. Meta-analyses directed to finding the relationship between working memory and schizophrenia have since provided reliable evidence which shows a significant association between memory dysfunction and schizophrenia. Cohens, (2012) posits the effects size nomenclature in particular to the adverse conditions of schizophrenia on working memory that there was a sizeable discreet record on impairment of test and recall as well as moderate experiments on recognition. This suggested that there is a possibility of a particular deficit as far as retrieval is concerned. Regarding working memory, Lee & Park, (2008) published an article dented of research demonstrating a significant shortfall in working memory across 124 studies. However, they alluded the memory gaps were ideally eminent in visualization more expressly than the verbal working mind (Ripke et al., 2013).

Further, on a different note, (Vadhan, Serper, and Haney, 2009), researched different literature about young people at high risk of developing schizophrenia because of varying drug and substance abuse, the reason to choose this age set was due to the prevalence of drug use among them. In most of the study groups, the condition was found to be common manifesting characteristics such as disruption of working memory which has far-reaching impacts on the patient (Vadhan, Serper & Haney, 2009). The initial condition was proportionally associated with the onset of adult schizophrenia in which case the deficit in working memory became the hallmark feature. People suffering from schizophrenic disorders have been found to exhibit impaired performances on some tests that have been carried out on the working memory. These platforms of working memory include auditory verbal, visuospatial as well as auditory nonverbal domains, about healthy participant controls (Vadhan, Serper & Haney, 2009). In addition to memory impairment, there have been cases associated with a decrement in cognitive performances in which the patients are unable to take in and retain motor and cognitive information.

Many research tests have therefore found out that working memory performance is broadly correlated with performance taking account of another trial that relates to different cognitive functions, for instance, motor functions and delayed memory in patients with schizophrenia, thus was converse to healthy control participants (Vadhan, Serper & Haney, 2009). The primary and secondary working memory to enhance motor performances has been reported as a predictive of functional outcome in schizophrenic conditions. Overly, the deficit in working memory is associated with features of schizophrenic illness, and therefore it has been proposed to be a clinical area of relevance to target for remediation.

In another research to determine the impacts of schizophrenia on working memory, (Lee, Folley, Gore, and Park, 2008) sought to look at the brain literature concerning the working memory to shed more light on the matter on the extent it is affected by schizophrenia. Within the brain, there is an abnormal occurrence of prefrontal section playing an integral role in support of memory functionality eliciting deficits of people with schizophrenia. The working memory deficit, however, was initially reported in the early 1990s, and it has provided an essential platform for understanding this mental disorder. They undertook to work with a population of healthy controls. In healthy human beings, the working memory is correlated to with a rise in prefrontal activation. This is converse to the case of the accuracy of working memory and schizophrenic behaviors (Lee et al., 2008). Several neuroimaging works regarding the working memory, in essence, have revealed that the hypofrontality task related to schizophrenic conditions is severed with the impacts of the illness.

The findings as an about the research goal revealed that behavioral data from the healthy controls are more accurate in working memory than in schizophrenia patients. Ideally, some of the reasons why schizophrenia have been categorized as a disorder of the mind are that healthy control individual captured in the experiments shows expected lateral pattern of right hemisphere activation within the brain during the spatial working memory. The suggestion, therefore, is that even a simple paradigm, for instance, in the cases of response delaying, an individual should be more careful to r...