title: Spatial attentional control is not impaired in schizophrenia: Dissociating specific deficits from generalized impairments.
abstract: 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 (Oltmanns & Neale, 1975) or merely reflect a generalized impairment (Dickinson & Harvey, 2009). Recent evidence also suggests visual attentional control for encoding into working memory may be selectively spared in people with schizophrenia (Gold et al., 2006). 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota.
authors.forename: Ansam A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Elshaikh
authors.affiliation: Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
authors.forename: Scott R
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2782-0856
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Sponheim
authors.affiliation: Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
authors.forename: Matt V
authors.initials: MV
authors.lastname: Chafee
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota.
authors.forename: Angus W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: MacDonald
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*