Thought disorder in schizophrenia: cognitive and neuroscience approaches

Research with schizophrenics is reviewed in the areas of the startle reflex, subject-initiated evoked potentials, and two-stimulus evoked potentials. A hypothesis of an early (pre-100 ms) information-processing deficit is posited and further refined by results presented from brain evoked potentials during a backward-masking experiment. The implications of these findings for the speech component of schizophrenic thought disorder are speculated upon, with specific reference to failures of temporal sequencing control that may underlie schizophrenic speech dysfunction and may be attributable to defective thalamic control. Recent neuroanatomical findings of abnormalities in the hippocampus and thalamus of schizophrenics are presented, and considered as likely contributors to the early information-processing deficits posited.