Beyond the Inhibition of Return of Attention: Reduced Habituation to Threatening Faces in Schizophrenia

Abstract

Attention deficits are prominent among the core symptoms of schizophrenia. A recent meta-analysis has suggested that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit in endogenous disengagement of attention. In this research, we used a standard spatial cueing paradigm to examine whether the attention deficit of such patients is due to impaired attentional disengagement or defective novelty detection/habituation processes. In a spatial cueing procedure with peripheral non-predictive cues and a detection task, we manipulated the valence of either the cue or the target (i.e., a threatening vs. scrambled face) in two separate experiments. The control group exhibited a smaller inhibition of return (IOR) effect only when the target had an emotional load, not when the cue had an emotional load. In the patient group, a larger emotional effect appeared when the threatening face was the target; by contrast, no effect of valence was observed when the threatening face was the cue: IOR was delayed or completely absent independently of valence. The present findings are in conflict with the hypothesis that IOR is due to the disengagement of attention and the subsequent inhibition to return. Instead, they seem to suggest a cost in detecting new information at a previously cued location. From this perspective, it seems that patients with schizophrenia might have a deficit in detecting new information and considering it as new in the current context.

Gene Dosage in the Dysbindin Schizophrenia Susceptibility Network Differentially Affect Synaptic Function and Plasticity

“…GABAergic interneuron dysfunction is also observed in mice lacking dysbindin Larimore et al, 2014), as well as in both the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus of schizophrenia patients (Benes and Berretta, 2001;Beasley et al, 2002;Hashimoto et al, 2003Hashimoto et al, , 2008Nakazawa et al, 2012). Second, impaired sensory habituation is a common manifestation in schizophrenia subjects (Geyer and Braff, 1987;Braff et al, 1992;Holt et al, 2005;Williams et al, 2013;Hu et al, 2014). In humans, sensory habituation defects are considered an intermediate, or "endo-"phenotype.…”

Attentional Bias to Beauty with Evolutionary Benefits: Evidence from Aesthetic Appraisal of Landscape Architecture

“…In addition, if landscape architecture stimuli can bias attention allocation, the psychological mechanisms underlying the attentional bias effect on landscape architecture remain unclear. Previous studies have demonstrated that the mechanisms of attentional bias and orienting cannot be considered as fully automatic (for a review see Santangelo and Spence, 2008 ), and further researches also adopted the spatial cueing paradigm and identified that there are two main components of attentional bias, faster orienting and delayed disengagement of attention ( Posner, 1980 ; Posner and Petersen, 1990 ; Vogt et al, 2008 ; Langley et al, 2011 ; Hu et al, 2014 ; Vromen et al, 2014 ; Harrison and Woodhouse, 2016 ), which correspond to early and later attentional processing, respectively. In this paradigm, participants need to judge whether the dot (target) is presented on the left or right side of the screen.…”

Inhibition of Return Is Modulated by Negative Stimuli: Evidence from Subliminal Perception

“…However, this hypothesis does not fit well with previously experimental results. Whether emotional, neutral faces or spiders are presented at the peripheral cueing locations, the magnitude of IOR effect have no conspicuous difference under all cue conditions ( Stoyanova et al, 2007 ; Lange et al, 2008 ; Hu et al, 2014 ), indicating that IOR is blind to emotion stimuli. Another special central cue-target paradigm presented supraliminal emotion cues at the center of the screen found that the attentional system tended to inhibit irrelevant negative emotion but not inhibit irrelevant positive emotion ( Chao, 2010 ).…”