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Working memory might be responsible for learning difficulties in people with schizophrenia.

While learning disabilities have long been observed in people with schizophrenia, which affects about 1 percent of the population, it has been unclear whether there was a cause-and-effect relationship between these two factors.

"We really tend to think of learning as a unitary, single process, but really it is not," lead researcher Anne Collins of Brown University said in a news release.

Collins and co-researcher Professor Michael Frank were able to create an experimental task and a statistical model to differentiate two processes, working memory and reinforcement, in learning.

"We thought we could try to disentangle that here and see if the impairment was in both aspects, or only one of them," Collins said.

After comparing 49 schizophrenia patients to 36 healthy volunteers, researchers found that those with the mental disorder scored significantly lower in working memory part of the experiment. However, no differences were found in reinforcement learning.

Researchers said that the latest findings support the theory that working memory independently impairs learning in people with schizophrenia. However, no associations were found between reinforcement and learning impairments in schizophrenics. The study also suggests that targeting reinforcement is more conducive in improving the ability to learn in people with schizophrenia.

"More broadly it brings attention to the fact that we need to consider learning as a multiactor kind of behavior that can't be just summarized by a single sytem," Collins said. "It's important to design tasks that can separate them out so we can extract different sources of variance and correctly match them to different neural systems."

The findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience.