ABSTRACT
There have been hundreds of studies examining neuropsychological functioning in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, the vast majority of these have used cross-sectional, case±control designs to compare people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder with unaffected controls on measures of current cognitive functioning. Heinrichs and Zakzanis (1998) summarised the results of over 200 studies on cognitive function in schizophrenia and concluded that schizophrenia was characterised by a broadly based cognitive impairment, which affected all domains tested to varying degrees. In the case of bipolar disorder, de®cits tend to be much milder (Krabbendam et al., 2005), but patients do exhibit de®cits in executive function and verbal memory, even between illness episodes (Robinson et al., 2006).
