Psychosis proneness in a non-clinical sample II: A multi-experimental study of “Attentional malfunctioning”

Abstract

Deficits in attentional functioning in schizophrenic patients and in healthy subjects who score high on questionnaire measures of psychosis proneness have frequently been demonstrated with a variety of different experimental tasks. The present study ( N = 76) investigated the relationship between measures of performance in five different tasks that have been shown to reflect “attentional malfunctioning” in such subject samples. In addition, the study attempted to replicate previous findings of impaired performance in subjects who scored high on measures of psychosis proneness. All subjects participated in five different experimental tasks (reaction time cross-over, negative priming, latent inhibition of rule learning, latent inhibition of Pavlovian conditioning, blink reflex modulation) and completed a set of questionnaires that provided 10 different measures of psychosis proneness. The expected experimental effects were obtained in four of the five experiments. There was no evidence of negative priming. Differences in task performance between high and low scorers were evident in latent inhibition of Pavlovian conditioning, but not in the other four tasks. The measures of task performance derived from the experiments seemed to be independent of one another. A multiple regression analysis that investigated the extent to which task performance can predict psychosis proneness yielded only marginal effects. The present data seem to indicate that the different experimental tasks reflect different, specific aspects of information processing that should not be subsumed under a broad label such as “attentional functioning/malfunctioning”.