Toward a neuropsychology of memory in schizophrenia

Three brain regions that have been the focus of recent interest in the neuropathology of schizophrenia include the frontal lobes, the basal ganglia, and the temporal lobes. We tested patients with chronic schizophrenia on three memory tasks, the successful performance of which depends on the integrity of each of these three brain regions. Comparisons between chronic schizophrenic patients and normal control subjects yielded the following results: (a) patients were impaired in remembering the temporal order of previously presented events; (b) patients were impaired on a motor task of procedural learning; and (c) patients showed normal priming effects in an implicit memory task despite their recall deficit in an explicit memory task. The significance of these findings lies in their relation to neuropsychological findings in patients with dysfunction in frontal cortical, basal ganglia, and medial temporal lobe structures.