Functional MRI and novel picture-learning among older patients with chronic schizophrenia: abnormal correlations between recognition memory and medial temporal brain response.

The relationship between disordered brain function and learning deficits in chronic schizophrenia is unclear. The authors compared correlations of brain response to picture encoding with subsequent recognition memory between samples of clinically stable patients over age 45 with schizophrenia and demographically similar healthy individuals. Subjects were studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging during novel picture encoding and a control condition. Comparison subjects showed an inverse relationship between subsequent recognition memory and brain response in medial temporal areas. Among schizophrenia patients, brain response in these regions was positively correlated with recognition memory. Brain-behavior relationships during learning were thus found to be qualitatively different between schizophrenic patients and healthy subjects.