ABSTRACT
Whatever causes schizophrenia, it is evident that the pathological process is played out mainly in the domains of higher mental function. As a result there has been a steady stream of attempts to identify a core psychological disturbance or group of disturbances in the disorder. These have ranged far and wide across the different subspecialties of experimental psychology, but overall the application of two broad strategies can be discerned. These might be referred to as, on the one hand, the search for the abnormalities that underlie the presenting clinical picture of schizophrenia, and, on the other, the abnormalities that merely lie behind it.
