Performance characteristics of chronic schizophrenia on attention tests sensitive to unilateral brain damage
Mizuno, M.; Kato, M.; Sartori, G.; Okawara, H.; Kashima, H.
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 185(7): 427-433
1997
ISSN/ISBN: 0022-3018 PMID: 9240360 Document Number: 473393
The aims of this study were to investigate the lateralization hypothesis of schizophrenia, comparing chronic schizophrenics with unilateral brain-damaged subjects and normal controls, using attentional tests sensitive to the unilateral brain damage. Three attentional tests with different modes of stimuli, two vigilance tasks that require the self-paced or nonself-paced responses of subjects and one divided attention task, were administered to 28 chronic schizophrenics, 26 right and 24 left unilateral brain-damaged subjects, and 20 normal controls. The results indicated that schizophrenics performed a possible right-hemisphere damages pattern and also a left pattern in part, with failure of all tasks to show either pattern related to a number of differences between the three tasks. Furthermore, the attention deficits of schizophrenics are less than those of brain-damaged subjects but are clearly abnormal compared with the normal controls.