The Effect of Cognitive Function on Imitation Skills in Patients with Schizophrenia.

The purpose of this study is to identify how cognitive functions such as attention and cognitive processes, such as the retention process to maintain an image needed in the learning by imitation process, are related to the ability to convert this into action (imitation) in patients with schizophrenia. Many people with schizophrenia have a lower imitation ability compared to healthy persons. Those with low imitation ability had lower scores for cognitive functions such as MMSE and visuospatial cognitive functions such as the number of correct answers in MRT. As described above, reduced imitation ability in patients with schizophrenia is caused by problems in information processing which temporarily retains and manipulates visual information during the performance of a task.