In the first group, schizophrenia patients showed poorer task performance on all tasks and less prefrontal cortex activation during all but the Stroop Task compared to healthy subjects. In the second group, schizophrenia patients showed poorer task performance and less prefrontal cortex activation during VFTs and TOH tasks than healthy subjects. We then performed discriminant analysis by a stepwise method using Δ[oxy-Hb] and task performance measures as independent variables. The discriminant analysis in the first group included task performance of TOH, VFT letter and VFT category and Δ[oxy-Hb] of VFT letter. As a result, 88.3 % of the participants were correctly classified as being schizophrenic or healthy subjects in the first analysis. The discriminant function derived from the first group correctly assigned 75 % of the subjects in the second group. Our findings suggest that NIRS measurement could be applied to differentiate patients with schizophrenia from healthy subjects.