Information Processing and Attentional Functioning in the Developmental Course of Schizophrenic Disorders

Abstract

This article examines the evidence that certain deficits in information processing and attentional functioning are present across populations at risk for schizophrenic disorder, with active schizophrenic psychotic symptomatology, and in relative remission after a schizophrenic psychosis. In addition, the evidence that some deficits in processing information occur only in the actively psychotic period is inspected. Deficits in vigilance tasks with high-processing loads, in forced-choice span of apprehension for large arrays, and in serial recall for items that involve active rehearsal occur across risk populations, actively symptomatic schizophrenic patients, and relatively remitted schizophrenic patients. These deficits may reflect vulnerability factors for schizophrenic disorders. Reaction time crossover, dichotic listening, backward masking, and referential communication deficits might also be vulnerability indicators. These deficits may be related to a reduction in the processing capacity that is available for task-relevant cognitive operations in persons vulnerable to schizophrenic disorder, which could, in turn, be caused by several different underlying cognitive anomalies. Cognitive deficits that have been found only during actively psychotic periods or in chronic schizophrenic patients, such as poorer recognition of briefly presented, single, familiar letters or numbers, are characterized by low demands on processing capacity. These deficiencies may be caused by further reduction in available processing capacity or a temporary disruption of automatic as well as attention-demanding processes; they could also reflect a stable, more severe cognitive deficit in a subtype of schizophrenic disorder.

The Effects of the Preferential 5-HT2A Agonist Psilocybin on Prepulse Inhibition of Startle in Healthy Human Volunteers Depend on Interstimulus Interval

“…This finding supports the general concept that deficits in early pre-attentive information processing may underlie the more complex attentional and cognitive abnormalities in psychotic states such as schizophrenia (McGhie and Chapman, 1961;Nuechterlein and Dawson, 1984;Nuechterlein et al, 1994). Specifically, it is thought that schizophrenia patients suffer from a form of sensory inundation related to attentional deficits that are caused by a general inability to filter external intrusive stimuli and thereby focus on important and information-laden aspects of the environment (Braff et al, 1978Nuechterlein and Dawson, 1984;Geyer and Braff, 1987). Along this line of argument, there is to date only one study that directly demonstrated that PPI deficits in schizophrenia subjects are correlated with distractibility in a continuous performance task and with lateralized attention on the Posner test (Karper et al, 1996).…”

A Compensatory Mirror Cortical Mechanism for Facial Affect Processing in Schizophrenia

“…Frontal lobe patients are known to produce uncontrolled behaviors imitating simple actions that other individuals perform in their presence (L'Hermitte et al 1972). Frontal lobe pathology has been documented in schizophrenia (Jeste et al 1996;Weinberger et al 1986), and flawed frontal gating mechanisms have been hypothetically associated to the perceptual and information-processing deficits seen in this condition (Braff et al 1995;Nuechterlein and Dawson 1984). Schizophrenic patients show motor abnormalities such as grimacing, echopraxia, posturing, stereotypy, echolalia and others in speech production , which could be the result of prefrontal gating failures.…”

“…The mirror-like premotor and motor increased compensatory activity we describe here could be facilitated by such a prefrontal deficit, particularly when processing of facial affect information relevant for social functioning is required that demands additional resources. Patients with schizophrenia exhibit a number of sensory and perceptual processing deficits (Braff et al 1995;Nuechterlein and Dawson 1984) likely contrib-uting to prefrontal-based perception-action cycle abnormalities. Among those, deficits specifically related to facial affect discrimination may involve cerebral sensory systems such as the superior temporal sulcus, the fusiform gyrus, and the inferior frontal cortex, as some studies indicate (Hariri et al 1999;Nakamura et al 1999;Haxby et al 2000;Allison et al 2000).…”

Reduced specialized processing in psychotic disorder: a graph theoretical analysis of cerebral functional connectivity

“…Attention/vigilance was assessed using a Continuous Performance Test (CPT‐HQ) with working memory (WM) load, also known as CPT‐AX (Nuechterlein and Dawson 1984) (longer reaction times reflecting worse performance). The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)‐III (Wechsler 1997) subtest Arithmetic was used to measure WM, which addresses both verbal comprehension and arithmetic skills.…”