Disentangling the attentional deficit in schizophrenia: pointers from schizotypy

Abstract

It has been argued that schizophrenia is associated with abnormalities in the allocation of attention, and that such abnormalities extend to members of the healthy population who are high in schizotypy; however, alternative interpretations of previous experimental evidence relating to this issue are possible. We present a learned irrelevance paradigm that provides a less equivocal measure of attentional processing during learning, and demonstrate a reliable reduction in learned irrelevance among healthy participants with high scores on a dimension of schizotypy corresponding to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. These results support the suggestion that high schizotypy (and, by extension, schizophrenia) is associated with deficits in the appropriate allocation of attention.