The neural pathology of episodic memory deficits in schizophrenia is not fully understood, but regions within the medial temporal lobe (MIL) may be particularly important. The perirhinal cortex (PRC) is critical for assessing item familiarity, the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) for processing context information (i.e., time and space), and the hippocampus (HC) for binding items and contexts to support recollective, or contextual, retrieval (Eichenbaum et al, 2007). Volume reductions in the MTL have been observed in schizophrenia (e.g., Nelson et al., 1998; Sim et al., 2006) and an fMRI meta-analysis found increased PHC activity in patients relative to controls (Ragland et al., 2009). Moreover, studies examining relationships between MTL volumes and scores on standardized memory batteries reported correlations between HC volume and memory performance in patients with schizophrenia (e.g., Karnik-Henry et al., 2012), and correlations between HC and PHC volume with memory performance in siblings of patients (Karnik-Henry et al., 2012). These findings, along with evidence that schizophrenia is related to larger deficits in recollection than familiarity (Libby et al., 2013), suggest that both HC and PHC may be affected by and mediate memory deficits in schizophrenia. Nonetheless, there have not been any attempts to link MTL volume reductions in schizophrenia with recollection and familiarity.
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