Schizophrenic syndromes and frontal lobe performance.

A battery of neuropsychological tests sensitive to frontal lobe impairment was administered to 43 chronic schizophrenic patients to delineate the abnormality of mental processing associated with the syndromes of psychomotor poverty and disorganisation, which had been identified in a previous study of the segregation of schizophrenic symptoms. Psychomotor poverty was found to be associated with slowness of mental activity, including slowness of generating words. The disorganisation syndrome was associated with impairment in tests in which the subject is required to inhibit an established but inappropriate response.