Auditory distraction and thought disorder in chronic schizophrenic inpatients. Evidence for separate contributions by incapacity and poor allocation and a subsyndrome related to the allocation deficit.
This study investigated auditory attentional processes associated with schizophrenic thought disorder. Thirty-five chronically schizophrenic, state hospital inpatients were assessed for thought disorder using the Thought, Language, and Communication Disorders Scale (TLC) and tested in an attentional task. Two measures of attention were derived from the Digit Span Distraction Test (DSDT) (Oltmannns, T.F., Neale, J.M., 1975. Schizophrenic performance when distractors are present: attentional deficit or differential task difficulty. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 84, 205-209), a digit recall task in which distractor digits were interspersed with target digits. The two measures were Distractibility -- the overall inaccuracy of recall -- which measured attentional incapacity, and Distractible Intrusion -- the number of irrelevant digits recalled -- which was developed in this study to separately measure the inability to allocate attentional resources. These two measures predicted thought disorder strongly and independently. Distractibility did not significantly correlate with any TLC subscale. In contrast, Distractible Intrusions correlated with the TLC subscales Distractible Speech, Incoherence, Loss of Goal, and Word Approximations. The present findings suggest that these subtypes may comprise a distinct subsyndrome of thought disorder, characterized by a dysfunctionally low threshold for selecting appropriate speech information, and that an attentional allocation deficit is related to this language dysfunction.
Moser
R K
RK
Coney Island Hospital, 2601 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11235, USA. rkevmo@aol.com
Cienfuegos
A
A
Barros
J
J
Javitt
D
D
D000328:Adult; D001308:Auditory Perceptual Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D013577:Syndrome