["Modality shift" paradigms and subjective basic symptoms in schizophrenic patients with various developmental...

Clinical experimental research on schizophrenia does not consider maturation processes of brain function in the majority of cases. In the course of neuronal organization and the differentiation phases of cerebral systems, early traumas in functionally important regions of the brain are accompanied by a facultative impairment of complex systems of information processing. Against the background of the comprehensively coherent "integrative psychobiological model of schizophrenia" (Ciompi) with high construct validity, (experimental) psychology investigations are reported on in the context of the "high-risk" concept in 44 young (20-37 years old) and mainly chronic schizophrenic patients with formation of a specific hypothesis for the developmental biology of the condition. In two homogeneous groups with the same structure, it is checked whether a discriminative appraisal concerning a different organization principle of central information processing systems is possible with "crossmodal" choice-reaction times (cCRT) and certain subscales of the Frankfurt symptom questionnaire (FBF) with regard to alternatively distributed and specially operationalized anamnestic biological risk factors. It can be objectively established in terms of experimental psychology that postpsychotically de-actualized "risk-free" schizophrenics differ from the reference group with a high-risk anamnesis in terms of significantly prolonged cCRT, but not from healthy subjects and an "MBD" control group. In addition, the FBF subscores "weakness of selective attention" and "loss of automatized skills" correlate with poor cCRT.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)