Children with a schizophrenic disorder: neurobehavioral studies.

This paper summarizes retrospective and cross-sectional neurobehavioral studies of schizophrenic children. Retrospective studies of schizophrenic children reveal that during early childhood, 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 impairments 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 psychosis, 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 argued 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.