Cognitive Dysfunction in Psychiatric Disorders

The goal of this article is to provide a brief overview of our understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms that contribute to deficits in a number of cognitive domains in schizophrenia. This article focuses on working memory (the ability to temporarily maintain and manipulate information), executive control (including error detection and correction, and context processing), and episodic memory (the ability to learn and retrieve new information). All of these are domains known to be impaired in actively ill individuals with schizophrenia, and deficits in all of these cognitive domains are known to be related to functional outcome in this debilitating disorder.