Learning transfer in patients with Schizophrenia: Implications for generalization effects and remediation of WCST deficits

A new card sorting task designed as an alternate to the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) was administered to twenty patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and a comparison group of twenty patients with non-schizophrenic diagnoses. The purpose of this study was to determine if patients diagnosed with schizophrenia could transfer learning of an alternate card sorting test (AST) to the WCST. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenia performed worse at baseline and on most trials of card-sorting tasks compared to other patients. Patients taught the AST significantly improved their performance on the WCST. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenia can learn, transfer, and apply basic card sorting principles from an alternate card sorting task to the WCST. Thereby demonstrating that learning of sorting principles is robust and not merely the rote recall of specific response sets as previously theorized.