Memory and attention dysfunctions in story recall in schizophrenia: evidence of a possible frontal malfunctioning.

Story recall deficits in schizophrenia have been related to some deficit in interhemispheric transfer of information, suggestive of a collosal pathology or, alternatively, to malfunctioning in attention and mnesic systems. The present investigation, performed on 61 DSM-IIIR schizophrenic inpatients and 40 age-and education-matched, normal controls demonstrates that story recall deficit is dependent on the length and complexity of the stories. This finding might implicate a critical role for the attention and mnesic functions in determining story recall performances. Both functions have an anatomo-functional substrate in neural circuits involving the frontal lobe, which also plays a critical role in determining the level of the conceptualization and abstraction capacities.