ABSTRACT
Despite the notion of apparent ‘recovery’ between episodes of bipolar disorder,1 impairments in cognitive task performance have been reported during remission.2,3 These deficits have been observed across a range of cognitive domains including declarative memory,4,5 attention6 and executive function.7-9 However, when residual symptomatology is controlled for a specific deficit in attention, executive function predominates.2,3,6,8 This implies that a dysfunction of the neuronal substrates underlying cognitive operations may exist alongside alterations in limbic function. The use of cognitive paradigms to elicit information about neural networks has been established within the literature relating to schizophrenia and is now beginning to be applied to studies of bipolar disorder.
