Inhibition of return and schizophrenia: A meta-analysis

Abstract

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon that involves inhibited or delayed orienting to previously cued locations in favor of attending to novel locations. To date, research on IOR in patients with schizophrenia has generated mixed, and seemingly conflicting, results. Some researchers report patients with schizophrenia exhibit blunted or delayed IOR, while other researchers report normal IOR, in terms of time course and magnitude. This meta-analysis summarizes the literature that has employed an IOR task in patients with schizophrenia and with controls while focusing upon a procedural feature, the use of a cue back to fixation, between the cue and target that is known to be important when executive control has been hampered in non-clinical populations. Fifteen experiments were located yielding a total sample of 362 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 285 controls. Using a meta-analytic approach, results of the present analyses show that patients with schizophrenia demonstrate delayed IOR in the single cue procedure. In the cue back to fixation procedure, the time course of IOR among patients is more consistent with that of controls. Differences in measured IOR between patients with schizophrenia and controls are largely related to a deficit in endogenous disengagement of attention.