[Levels of cognitive investigations in schizophrenia]

Attentional, information-processing and learning deficits can be evidenced in a significant number of schizophrenic patients. Nevertheless these deficits don't seem to characterize automatically a subgroup of negative patients; they can be as well encountered in positive form of schizophrenia or in non psychotic disorders. Often these deficits are preexisting to the development of the disease; they are considered by some authors as being inherited within the spectrum of schizophrenic disorders, schizotypic personality being part of it. Such cognitive disturbances are probably linked with multiple dysfunctions located in cortical and subcortical dopaminergic structures.