Associative learning in acutely ill and recovered schizophrenic patients

Eight acutely ill deluded schizophrenic patients were compared with eight matched recovered patients on an associative learning task. Ten word pair associations were presented over five trials. Subsequently the subjects were presented with ten novel pairings over three trials, one word from the first pair associated with a new partner. Recovered patients performed better than acutely ill patients on both stages of the task. This result does not support the neuropsychological model of Gray et al. (1991) which predicts that acute schizophrenia is characterised by a weakening of the effect of previous experience on new learning.