During the past few decades, the schizophrenia cognitive literature has focused mainly on executive functions, a cluster of cognitive brain functions involved in attention, planning, sequencing, decision making, initiating and inhibiting behaviors which are associated with the prefrontal cortex. Emerging evidence, however, indicates that long-term memory, associated with the temporal lobes, is an equally, if not more salient feature of the impaired cognitive profile of schizophrenia. Evidence of impaired encoding relative to spared post-encoding, and an apparent dissociation between the levels of impairment of explicit and implicit memory processes, provides further indication that the long-term memory deficits of schizophrenia are mediated primarily by the medial-temporal lobes rather than other cortical structures. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to investigate the neurobiological basis of long-term memory deficits. Data from these studies have confirmed the role of the frontal, medial and inferior temporal regions in the memory dysfunctions observed in patients. Further, research suggests that memory strategies used by individuals with schizophrenia might be impaired as a result of the disturbance of the functional connectivity of prefrontal and temporal-limbic structures. In order to identify the unique contribution of the temporal lobes to the long-term memory deficit of schizophrenia, fMRI studies must focus on memory tasks which specifically elicit activation in this brain region.