Reduced hippocampal activation during encoding and recognition of words in schizophrenia patients.

Objective: In patients with schizophrenia, impaired hippocampal activation either during encoding or recognition tasks has been observed in a few functional imaging experiments. In this fMRI study, the authors report results of word encoding and recognition in schizophrenia patients and healthy comparison subjects, with a special focus on correcting for behavioral recognition success in order to prevent a bias related to lower task performance in the schizophrenia patients.

Method: The verbal encoding and recognition tasks were both first analyzed irrespective of recognition success.