Here is an minimal example of the error I get. If I understood the documentation correctly, this should be working, but it seems I did not.
a={}
a['test1']=1
a['test2']=2
a['test3']=3
import scipy.io as io
io.savemat('temp',{'a':a})
b = io.loadmat('temp')
b['a'].keys()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'numpy.ndarray' object has no attribute 'keys'