Background. In recent years, evidence has accumulated that a significantproportion of schizophrenic patients have severe memory impairment, which cannotbe attributed to the effects of medication, chronicity or institutionalization.Our group has demonstrated that memory impairment is associated with poorpsychosocial outcome and treatment resistance. Work on the classical amnesicsyndrome has suggested that memory training is facilitated by adopting an‘errorless learning’ approach, where subjects do not experience failure duringlearning. This is based on the theory that the preserved implicit memory ofamnesic patients results in implicitly remembered incorrect responsesinterfering with target items, in the absence of a functioning explicit memorysystem to allow differentiation. Method. We compared three groups of subjects,memory-impaired schizophrenic patients, memory unimpaired schizophrenic patientsand healthy controls. Results. An errorless learning approach conferred asignificant advantage on the memory-impaired schizophrenic group, bringing theirperformance up to the level of both control groups. In contrast, adopting atraditional trial and error, or errorful approach resulted in markedly impairedperformance in the memory-impaired schizophrenic group only. Conclusions. Weconclude that errorless learning approaches may be worthy of further evaluationin the cognitive rehabilitation of memory-impaired schizophrenic patie
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