150 11. Psychology, Neuro- important implications for the remediation of these abilities in sub- jects participating in medication-free research. (Funding provided by NIMH) SPONTANEOUS IMPROVEMENT IN SEVERE, CHRONIC SCHIZOPHRENIA AND ITS NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL CORRELATES G. Murray,* V. Leeson, R J. McKenna Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1TN, United Kingdom Although cognitive deficits are established as commonplace in schizophrenia, the longitudinal course of these deficits remains unclear. It is known that patients occasionally undergo sponta- neous clinical improvement after years of severe illness, a topi- cal example being the mathematician John Nash. The cognitive correlates of such recovery are therefore of some interest. Here we document changes in the cognitive profiles of two chronical- ly ill patients with schizophrenia (TC and RF). Both patients underwent substantial spontaneous improvement after having been severely unwell with a stable clinical picture over a number of years. The improvements could not be attributed to medica- tion, which had been unchanged in each case for several years. Each patient had undergone neuropsychological assessment whilst ill, and this was repeated after improvement. Both patients showed improvement in general intellectual function, as shown in the table. Before recovery TC showed impairment on multiple tests of visuospatial function. After improvement his scores on all these tests were in the normal range. Both patients originally showed impaired naming; there were minor improvements in each case, although RF remained severely impaired (Graded Naming Test score 4/30). Both patients showed patchy and gen- erally modest improvements in memory and executive function, but continued to demonstrate abnormalities relative to popula- tion norms in these domains. These findings indicate that cogni- tive impairment in schizophrenia is not always a 'static encephalopathy', but may be to some extent a function of clini- cal status. WAIS FullScaleIQ WA1S Verbal IQ WAIS Performance IQ MMSE TCM, age44 NART IQ 113 RF F, age 39 NART IQ 105 1990-95 2001 1995 2002 68 82 66 77 73 96 73 79 53 66 61 76 24 28 24 29 PROFILES OF COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT IN SCHIZOPHRENIA AND PARKINSON'S DISEASE Z. Nassika,* E. Pomarol-Clotet, C. Rice, G, Lennox, G. E. Berrios, E J. McKenna Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1TN, United Kingdom Schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease share not only a basis in abnormal dopamine function (established or putative), but also the complication of cognitive impairment. This ranges from minor to severe in both disorders and may disproportionately affect executive function. We administered a comprehensive battery of neuropsy- chological tests to 14 patients with schizophrenia and 12 non- demented patients with Parkinson's disease. Both patient groups were selected on the basis of having preserved general intellectual function (WAIS-R IQ >/= 85). The two patient groups showed a sim- ilar profile of impairment. Based on 5th percentile cutoffs, impair- ment was uncommon on 3 visual tests (PD 2.8% and SZ 2.4% test failures), 4 visuospatial tests (PD 0% and SZ 3.7% test failures), and 2 language tests (PD 4.8% and SZ 3.6% test failures). Both groups, however, showed more failures on 4 memory tests (PD 10.4% and SZ 20.8% test failures) and 4 executive function tests (PD 13.9% and SZ 10.4% test failures. The similarity of the groups' performance was supported by ANCOVA with age and estimated premorbid IQ as covariates which revealed no significant differences for any test The findings suggest that intellectually preserved patients with schizo- phrenia and Parkinson's disease both show a pattern of selective memory and executive impairment. Schizophrenic patients may, however, show greater memory impairment. DIFFUSION TENSOR IMAGING CORRELATES OF LEARNING AND MEMORY IN CHRONIC SCHIZOPHRENIA R G. Nestor,* M. Kubicki, M. E. Shenton, C. G. Allen, M. A. Niznikiewicz, R. W. McCarley Psychology, University of Massachusetts - Boston, Boston, MA, USA Bteuler first identified a disturbance in associations as a hallmark of schizophrenic neuropsychology. More recent connectionist comput- er simulation models have suggested that these disease-related cog- nitive failures may reflect faulty modulation of parametric weights that serve as idealized synapses that bind word representations into distributed networks of associations. However, the neural represen- tations that may underlie schizophrenic association disturbance have yet to be established. In the current study, we therefore aimed to examine the functional neuroanatomy of schizophrenic associative disturbance by combining standardized neuropsychological test methods with magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of brain connectivity within the same sample of patients with chronic schizophrenia. Thirteen male schizophrenic patients and 14 age- and gender-matched controls completed the Wechsler Memory Scale-III (WMS-III). Subjects also underwent DTI studies of the uncinate fasiculus (UF), the most prominent white matter tract connecting temporal-frontal brain regions, and often-hypothesized important anatomical loci in the disease-related neuropsychological distur- bance. Results indicated that for patients but not controls, reduced left UF correlated with lower scores on WMS-III summary index meas- ures of irmnediate memory (r=.633, p=.05), general memory (r=.721, p=.02) and delayed auditory recognition memory (r=.726, p=.02). Reduced left UF also correlated significantly with specific compo- nent subtest scores of these WMS-III index scores, including both immediate (r=.790, p=.006) and delayed (r=.632, p=.05) recall of word paired associates, delayed recall (r=.739, p=.015) and delayed recognition (r=.733, p=.016) of stories, and immediate recall of fam- ily scenes (r=.625, p=.05). By contrast, right UF did not correlate with any of these same WMS-III summary index measures of learn- ing and memory. We conclude that reduced connectivity of a dis- tributed network of left frontal and temporal regions may contribute to schizophrenic impairment in learning and memory, especially for International Congress on Schizophrenia Research 2003