Abstract
Recent advances in our understanding of working memory (WM) suggest that performance on tasks that assess WM confound an individual’s maximum WM capacity with trial-to-trial variations in their attentional control. This limitation regarding one of the most commonly assessed cognitive constructs in clinical psychology raises important questions regarding the true locus of performance deficits found in the assessment of clinical populations such as Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders (SSD). Fortunately, new methodologies have been developed which can isolate and measure these two cognitive traits independently within a single task referred to as a discrete whole-report WM task. Within the task, participants are presented with six colored squares during the initial memory array and must make responses about each item. This design allows for a more detailed assessment of memory performance (0-6 items recalled correctly) which can be used to determine an individual’s complete memory performance on every trial. From this data, a computational model described in Hakim et al., (2020) determines an individual’s maximum WM capacity and their sustained attention capacity, a measure of the probability with which a participant achieves their maximum WM capacity throughout the experiment. The present study administered a whole-report WM task to 26 individuals, 15 with SSD and 11 healthy age-matched controls. Our results suggest participants with SSD were significantly impaired in both sustained attention capacity and maximum WM capacity, though to a larger extent in their sustained attention capacity. Moreover, removing trials where participants reported only 0 or 1 squares correctly significantly reduced differences in performance across the two groups in the whole report task. These results indicate that tracking and removing trials that reflect complete attentional lapses may provide more sensitive indices that better reflect true cognitive deficits.