Abstract
The purpose of this report was a selective review of recent findings concerning neuropsychological profile in patients with schizophrenia. Second, we introduced the results of our studies concerning semantic memory and/or brain imaging. We administered (1) verbal learning test, (2) story memory test, (3) verbal fluency test, (4) Make-a-guess task or (5) script task. As a result, (1)schizophrenic patients showed failure to spontaneously make use of the implicit semantic category, (2) patients performed worse than controls on the score of thematic sequencing, (3) semantic structure of patients was different from that of controls in animal category, (4) patients asked fewer functional or categorical questions and more random or inefficient questions than controls when they made a guess of object, (5) patients committed more errors on judging the events that sometimes happen on the frequency judgment task of one everyday situation. These findings suggest schema in long term memory is different between patients and controls. Characteristics in patients will be related to failure to spontaneously make use of category and problem in strategy of memory. The results of brain imaging studies suggest that memory impairments in patients with schizophrenia may be related to dysfunction in both the frontal region and the medial temporal area.
