Master of Arts Thesis, 2009

Wesleyan's competitive graduate program includes prior undergrads receiving a Master's degree in their fifth year as well as students from other schools completing the program.

Neurological Soft Signs, Neurocognition, and Everyday Life Skills in Schizophrenia
                Emily Langner

Neurological soft signs (NSS), which are subtle neurological abnormalities involving deficits in sensory integration, balance, and coordination of movements not linked to specific brain lesions, have been shown to correlate with symptoms of schizophrenia. They are also related to measures of cognition in patients, although the degree to which these relationships are specific or generalized remains unclear. Our study is designed to clarify the relationship between NSS, neurocognitive measures of attention, verbal memory and problem-solving, social cognitive measures and a measure of everyday functioning. We predict that lower performance on tasks involving frontal lobe functioning on the NES will be associated with impaired results on measures of frontal neurocognitive function, and that everyday life skills and social cognitive skills will be related to overall NES performance. These results could indicate that a subset of neurological soft signs have a predictive value for specific aspects of cognitive and everyday functioning in patients. Implications for the conclusions reached and directions for future research are discussed.

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