[Disorder of selective attention in patients with late-manifesting schizophrenia with a syndrome of involutional paranoia].

Selective attention was studied by registering cortical evoked potentials to acoustic stimuli in mental patients and mentally healthy subjects of old age. Disorder of selective attention in the patients was manifested in an impaired ability of the higher portions of the central nervous system to differentiate between essential and non-essential external stimuli as well as in a weakened inhibition of irrelevant information.