Source monitoring in patients with schizophrenia: A false fame effect

Twenty-four patients with schizophrenia and twenty-four normal controls participated in an experiment on memory for source. Using the false fame task (Jacoby, Kelly, Brown, & Jasechko, 1989a) participants made fame judgments on a series of famous and non-famous names presented via computer. The task later required participants to distinguish previously presented non-famous names from famous names and not previously presented non-famous names. As anticipated, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibited the false fame effect, but normal controls did not. Further, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia performed significantly worse than normal controls on the recognition portion of the task. These findings suggest that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibit diminished performance on a task that presumably taps into frontal lobe functioning.