The specificity of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) for assessing frontal lobe pathology remains controversial, although lesion and cerebral blood flow studies continue to suggest a role for the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in WCST performance. Inconsistencies might derive from the extended use of various WCST scores as equivalent indicators of frontal pathology. In this study, event-re...

The specificity of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) as a marker of frontal lobe pathology remains controversial. One problem is the lack of a well established correspondence between WCST errors and specific cognitive or neural processes. The conventional scoring of non-perseverative WCST errors does not discriminate between errors related to the efficient test of hypotheses during set shi...

The present study aimed to determine whether individuals with long-term schizophrenia have impaired prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to perform intended actions in the future. Three PM tasks (time-, event-, and activity-based) were administered to 60 schizophrenia patients and 60 matched controls. Patients performed significantly more poorly than controls on all three tasks. The...

The present study represents the first large scale confirmatory factor analysis of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The results generally support the three factor solutions reported in the exploratory factor analysis literature. However, only the first factor, which reflects general executive functioning, is statistically sound. The secondary factors, while likely reflecting meaningful c...

Body and brain undergo several changes with aging. One of the domains in which these changes are more remarkable relates with cognitive performance. In the present work, electroencephalogram (EEG) markers (power spectral density and spectral coherence) of age-related cognitive decline were sought whilst the subjects performed the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Considering the expected age-...

The persistence of aggressive criminal behavior is recurrently observed in offenders despite being previously advised on the negative consequences of their actions. One possible explanation for the continuation of aggressive behaviors could be that they are the consequence of either possible deficits in cognitive flexibility (set-shifting) or in altered feedback processing. Event-related brain ...

OBJECTIVE We compared patients with chronic schizophrenia and normal controls with respect to decision-making ability. Measures were implemented to control for the participants' intelligence levels as well as to ensure to use of a moderate sample size. The goal of this study was to confirm inconsistent results from previous studies which had stemmed from too small of a sample size, highly varia...

BACKGROUND Recognition of objects and their context relies heavily on the integrated functioning of global and local visual processing. In a realistic setting such as work, this processing becomes a sustained activity, implying a consequent interaction with executive functions. MOTIVATION There have been many studies of either global-local attention or executive functions; however it is relat...

Cognitive flexibility hinges on a readiness to direct attention to novel events, and on an ability to change one's mental set to find new solutions for old problems. Human event-related potential (ERP) studies have described a brain 'orienting' response to discrete novel events, marked by a frontally distributed positive potential peaking 300-400 ms post-stimulus (P3a). This brain potential has...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to compare the sustained attention and cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder type II. Methods: The research method was causal-comparative (case-control) type. Statistical population was all the patients with bipolar disorder type II and schizophrenia at Isar and Fatemi hospitals in 2015 i...