Intentional inhibition in memory and hallucinations: Directed forgetting and updating.
Abstract
Hallucinations have been recently associated with inhibitory deficits in memory. In this study, the authors investigated whether hallucinations were related to difficulties to inhibit irrelevant information from episodic memory (Experiment 1) and working memory (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, a directed forgetting task was used. This task measures participants' ability to intentionally forget some recently learned material, when instructions indicate that it is no longer relevant. In Experiment 2, an updating task was used. This task requires participants to intentionally suppress irrelevant information from working memory. Results showed that patients with schizophrenia with hallucinations presented inhibitory deficits in the directed forgetting task and an increase in the number of intrusions in the updating task, compared to patients without hallucinations and healthy controls. No correlations were found between indices of inhibition and other general, negative or positive symptoms. These findings support the existence of an association between intentional inhibition in memory and hallucinations, and they suggest that problems to suppress memory representations can underlie hallucinations in schizophrenia.
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Hallucination frequency in schizophrenia is associated with difficulties on tasks requiring suppression of irrelevant and distracting information, pointing to deficits in intentional inhibition.
“In support, studies have showed that hallucination frequency in SCZ was associated with difficulties on tasks requiring the suppression of irrelevant information and distracting information, like the ICIM and HSCT tasks, 98,99 a Directed Forgetting (DF) task, 100 and the Dichotic Listening task, 101 all pointing to deficits in intentional inhibition.”
From Are hallucinations due to an imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory influences on the brain? (2016) · cites this paper as [100]
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- Authors
- Soriano, M. F., Jiménez, J. F., Román, P., & Bajo, M. T.
- Affiliations
- Hospital San Agustín (ES)
- Universidad de Granada (ES)
- Venue
- Neuropsychology
- Published
- 2009
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 61-70
- ISSN
- 0894-4105 (ISSN-L)
- 1931-1559
- OpenAlex
- W1982412068
- Cited by
- 47
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 1.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Neuropsychology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (SEJ2005-00842/psi)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Schizophrenia research and treatment
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Hallucinations in medical conditions
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Keywords
- hallucinations, schizophrenia, directed forgetting, intentional inhibition, episodic memory, working memory, memory updating, inhibitory deficits, memory intrusion, negative symptoms
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Analysis of Variance, Female, Hallucinations, Humans, Inhibition, Psychological, Male, Memory Disorders, Memory, Short-Term, Neuropsychological Tests, Outpatients, Schizophrenia, Intention, Young Adult
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