COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES OF CHILDREN WITH A SCHIZOPHRENICDISORDER/

This article summarizes a series of cognitive/neuropsychological studi es of children with schizophrenia. One set of studies, which surveyed a broad range of neuropsychological functions, revealed no evidence th at children with schizophrenia are consistently impaired in sensory, p erceptual, or language functions. Rather, the studies showed that chil dren with schizophrenia performed poorly on tasks requiring sensory, p erceptual, and language processing that made extensive demands on info rmation-processing capacity. A second series of studies, which examine d visual information processing by manipulating the processing demands of span of apprehension tasks, yielded similar findings. The key char acteristic of tasks that elicit impaired performance in children with schizophrenia is that the task makes extensive demands on processing r esources. This suggests that these children have limited information-p rocessing capacity. Three hypotheses are proposed concerning the cogni tive processes that are impaired in children with schizophrenia: (1) t he cognitive processes that seem to be impaired in these children are part of a more general, hierarchically organized attention system; (2) the component processes of the system are subserved by different brai n structures; and (3) the structures are part of a network that includ es the frontal lobe and thalamus in interaction with the reticular act ivating system.