The Family Pictures test as a measure of impaired feature binding in schizophrenia

We investigated the use of the Family Pictures test from the Wechsler Memory Scale III as a measure of the ability to bind the multiple features of a complex visual scene in a study group of 77 patients with schizophrenia and 44 healthy controls. Patients demonstrated impaired recall of all scene features as well as a reduction in the number of features recalled for each remembered character. Secondary analyses using patients and controls matched for character recall also showed reduced feature binding in the patient group. Such feature binding deficits likely implicate hippocampal dysfunction, consistent with neuroimaging evidence of structural and functional compromise of the medial temporal lobe in schizophrenia.