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I. Chapman’s Tests of Distractibility and Associative Intrusion in Schizophrenia and Organic Brain Disease

IRWIN FEINBERG, M.D.; MARGARET MERCER, ph.D.

AMA Arch Gen Psychiatry 1960;2(5):504-511.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Investigations of performance on cognitive tasks usually result in the findings that normal subjects achieve the highest mean scores, schizophrenic subjects are intermediate, and subjects with organic brain disease perform most poorly. The range of performance of schizophrenic patients is usually quite broad, overlapping with that of good normal subjects, at one extreme, and with that of poor-performing patients with organic disease, at the other. However, the pattern of error scores of the schizophrenic subjects does not distinguish their performance from that of these other clinical groups. It seems likely, therefore, that such data reflect only nonspecific impairment of cognitive function. The degree of such impairment is usually less in randomly chosen groups of schizophrenic subjects than that found in similarly chosen groups of patients with organic brain disease.^* Since cognition in these patient groups grossly differs in many respects, one must conclude . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Bethesda, Md.

Saint Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C. (Dr. Mercer).

Laboratory of Clinical Science, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication Sept. 23, 1959.

These studies were carried out, in part, on the wards of Saint Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C. We are indebted to Dr. Winfred Overholser, Superintendent of Saint Elizabeths Hospital, for making these facilities available to us.

It might be argued that this group performance gradient does not indicate the relative mental abilities of these populations, but instead reflects biased selection. Thus, one may suspect that schizophrenics with greater thought pathology are likely to be more withdrawn, and hence less accessible to psychological testing, and that such a relationship between testability and thought impairment does not exist for S’s with chronic brain syndrome. However, this has not been our experience. We have often found the severely impaired, chronic schizophrenics to be more docile and cooperative than acutely ill patients of better prognosis and greater mental competence. Until more definitive information is available, we tend to believe that hospitalized schizophrenics as a group suffer from less over-all, nonspecific intellectual impairment than do patients hospitalized for organic brain disease.

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