Children with a schizopherenic disorder: Neurobehavioral studies

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Abstract
This paper summarizes retrospective and crosssectional neurobehavioral sutudies of schizophrenic children. Retrospective studies of schizophrenic children reveal that during early childhoodm, prior to the first onset of schizophrenic symptoms, most schizophrenic children showed delays in language acquisition and/or impairments and delays in visual-motor coordination. These impaiments appear to be developmental delays rather than fixed neurobehavioral impairments, because cross-sectional studies conducted when the children are at least 10 years of age, after the first onset of psychsis, fail to detect the same deficits. The results of behavioral, cognitive/neuropsychological studies as well as the study of event-related potentials measured during performance of cognitive tasks suggests that schizophrenic children suffer from limitations in processing resources. It is argoued that the developmental delays observed in schizophrenic children represent the greater time it takes them to automate certain skills. The delay in automation may reflect their limited information-processing capacity.