A strategy for the study of behavioral mechanisms of antipsychotic drug action in schizophrenia.

Abstract

The basic strategy being proposed is one of studying the time-course of antipsychotic drug effects upon performance measures in parallel with the timecourse of drug effects upon the symptoms of schizophrenia, general morbidity and ward behavior. Critical for the productivity of this strategy is the inclusion of performance measures that reflect functioning in psychological processes—e.g., attention, perception etc., in which schizophrenic-specific deficit or deviance has been demonstrated and which may be presumed to mediate symptom formation. Promising candidates for inclusion in a battery of performance measures under these criteria are those reflecting functioning in the information-processing sequence, i. e., in sensory-attentional-perceptual-cognitive processes. Given this approach, the examination of relationships between patterns of change at the level of deficit performance and of symptomatology, has the potentiality of disclosing both mechanisms of drug action and critical mediating mechanisms of schizophrenic disorder.