Neuropsychological dysfunction in schizotypal personality disorder: a profile analysis.

In order to examine the neuropsychological profile of schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), we studied a wide array of cognitive functions in 10 right-handed men who met DSM-III-R criteria for SPD and 10 matched normal controls. Cognitive functions included abstraction, verbal and spatial intelligence, memory and learning, language, attention, and motor skills. Neuropsychological profiles were constructed by standardizing test scores based on the means and standard deviations of the normal control group. SPD subjects showed significant decrements in performance on the California Verbal Learning Test, a word-list learning measure which requires semantic clustering for more efficient performance, and on the Wisconsin Card Sort Test, a measure requiring concept formation, abstraction, and mental flexibility. These results suggest possible areas of specific neuropsychological dysfunction in SPD, and are consistent with current hypotheses of left-temporal and prefrontal brain dysfunction in schizophrenia.