In our study we confirmed the existence of cognitive deficit in patients with depression and schizophrenia. Cognitive dysfunction had different intensity and depth in depression and in schizophrenia and different parameters of cognition were impaired. Our results manifested that performance of patients with schizophrenia was statistically lower in test of intelligence; there were no differences in memory test, even though certain trends to lower performance we found in patients with schizophrenia; in the test of executive functoins there was a statistically significant difference in dimension of Conceptual level responses, in other dimensoin there was no difference, but patients with depression had inferior performance; in the verbal fluency test there was no statistically significant difference between both groups, patients with schizophrenia had lower performance; attention – there was no statistically significant difference between both groups, worse performance we found in patients with schizophrenia; statistically significant difference was found in reaction time on both stimuli, visual and auditory stimulus, when markedly worse performance was found in patients with depression.

        Key words: depression, cognitive deficit, neuropsychological tests, schizophrenia.