Abstract
Latent inhibition refers to a retardation in learning about a stimulus that has been rendered familiar by non-reinforced preexposure, relative to a non-preexposed stimulus. Latent inhibition has been shown to be inversely correlated with schizotypy, and abnormal in people with schizophrenia, but these findings are inconsistent. One potential contributing factor to this inconsistency is that many tasks that purport to measure latent inhibition are confounded by alternative effects that also retard learning and co-vary with schizotypy (e.g. learned irrelevance and conditioned inhibition). Here, two within-participant experiments are reported that measure the effect of familiarity on learning without the confound of these alternative effects. Consistent with some of the clinical literature, a positive association was found between the rate of learning to the familiar, but not the novel, stimulus and the unusual-experiences dimension of schizotypy — implying abnormally persistent latent inhibition in high schizotypy individuals.
Highlights
For many years, experimental designs have been translated from the study of animal learning to abnormal psychology in an attempt to understand the symptoms associated with schizophrenia
A 2 × 2 mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) of individual median reaction times revealed a significant main effect of stimulus F(1,55) = 16.626, p b .001, partial η2 = .23, but no main effect of condition or interaction (Fs b 1), suggesting reaction times were similar for participants in both the replicated-task and the modified-task irrespective of target expectation during preexposure
If any of the predictor variables are associated with latent inhibition it would be expected that a relationship would be found with the preexposed stimulus, but not with the control non-preexposed stimulus
Summary
Experimental designs have been translated from the study of animal learning to abnormal psychology in an attempt to understand the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. A significant reduction in latent inhibition was attained by Granger et al, but this was a result of an association between the difference between the preexposed and non-preexposed stimuli and unusual experiences This latter observation is problematic, because any correlation between schizotypy and a composite constructed from these two scores does not reveal which of its components is, or is not, contributing to the overall effect. This task showed a latent inhibition effect — participants were slower to respond to presentations of X when it was cued by the preexposed letter rather than the non-preexposed letter, and a trend for a reduction in latent inhibition with the positive symptom dimension of schizotypy was observed As this procedure did not include a concurrent masking task during the preexposure stage of the experiment, it is difficult to explain this result in terms of learned irrelevance.
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