[Violation of Assessing the Salience of Information in Schizophrenia]

The history of study of schizophrenia has more than 100 years. During all this period there was collected a lot of data on clinical picture of the disease, psychological peculiarities of patients, biochemical and electrophysiological phenomena. In this respect it becomes actual nowadays to look for a concept that could combine different levels of schizophrenia research (clinical, biochemical, social, etc.) and explain relationships with various symptoms of the disease. In this article we analyze experimental psychological data on thinking of patients, instrumental studies (ERP fMRI, rhythmic patterns of thinking, dopamine theory) and their relationship with clinical implications. It is shown that all these data complement each other and allow us to tell about a basic violation in schizophrenia--the difficulty of patients to differentiate between more and less salient information. We can observe the violation on different levels of schizophrenia investigation and explain different symptoms of the disease as manifestations of that basic violation.