title: Performance characteristics of chronic schizophrenia on attention tests sensitive to unilateral brain damage.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuropsychiatry, School of Medicine, Keio University, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mizuno
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sartori
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Okawara
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kashima
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002908:Chronic Disease; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology