Spatial Attentional Control Is Not Impaired In Schizophrenia: Dissociating Specific Deficits From Generalized Impairments

摘要

A large literature has established that people with schizophrenia are impaired on tasks that require attentional control. However, evidence is mixed as to whether these impairments are specific deficits () or merely reflect a generalized impairment (). Recent evidence also suggests visual attentional control for encoding into working memory may be selectively spared in people with schizophrenia (). The current study used a cued backward masking task to investigate 23 people with schizophrenia and 27 healthy controls. People with schizophrenia were hypothesized to perform better on invalidly cued trials when making a simple identification or location judgment. However, we found schizophrenia impaired performance on both valid and invalid cues to the same degree whether the cue was a stored representation (top-down) or presented at the location of the stimulus (bottom-up). In contrast to a large neuropsychological literature, these findings suggest that people with schizophrenia show no specific spatial attentional control deficit. The errors that they make on such task may be consistent with a generalized impairment.