Latent inhibition in humans: Data, theory, and implications for schizophrenia.

Abstract

Learning about the consequences of a stimulus is retarded if that stimulus has been experienced without reinforcement. A literature review of this latent inhibition (LI) effect indicates that LI is similar in human and other species, although in adult humans it often requires a masking or distracter task. The discrepancy in conditions for producing LI can be accounted for by developmental differences in the automatic processing of unattended stimuli. In adults, automatic processes are subject to a controlled information-processing override. Masking prevents controlled processing of the preexposed stimuli so that they remain unattended. The role of masking in attenuating LI in schizotypal/schizophrenic groups is assessed. It is proposed that schizophrenia is related to an inability to use occasion-setting properties of context or to switch from controlled to automatic processing of inconsequential events.

Towards integrating phenomenology and neurocognition: Possible neurocognitive correlates of basic self-disturbance in schizophrenia

“…A major theme in this work is the failed suppression of attention to familiar or irrelevant information/stimuli in the environment, leading to aberrant salience of objects and associations [82,83] -or, to reverse the terminology, excessive attention to information that is highly familiar or irrelevant. A number of neurocognitive models and experimental paradigms have produced findings consistent with this view, including the memoryprediction model of cortical function [48,84,85], the salience dysregulation model based on dopamine system abnormalities [55,57,82], mismatch negativity reduction [86], latent inhibition [54,87,88], and Corlett's model of ketamine as a pharmacological model of psychosis [89,90]. Also, Hemsley [58,59,91] and Sass [9] drew on findings regarding malfunction in the hippocampus-based "comparator" system in schizophrenia, proposing that this dysfunction may result in an automatic, hyperreflexive awareness that disrupts the tacit/focal structure essential to normal experience of basic selfhood.…”

Disruption of Latent Inhibition in Rats with Postnatal Hippocampal Lesions

“…At present, it is not univocally discussed whether the stage, the duration of illness, or the treatment by neuroleptics could be responsible for these discrepancies. Latent inhibition is similar in humans and animals and can be viewed as reflecting the operation of analogous processes across species (Lubow and Gewirtz 1995).…”

Attentional modulation of the carry over of eye-movements between tasks

“…Cognitive inhibition is the ability to hold an item in working memory and subsequently ignore it (Nigg, 2000). This process is best measured by the latent inhibition paradigm (Lubow & Kaplan 1997), in which pre-exposed irrelevant stimuli become the target stimuli in subsequent tasks (Cohen, Sereni, Kaplan, Weizman, Kikinzon, Weiner, & Lubow, 2004;Lubow & Gewirtz, 1995). Latent inhibition refers to the inability to re-learn previously irrelevant stimuli as target stimuli (Granger, Prados, & Young, 2012) with findings showing that performance on the subsequent task is poorer than in the pre-exposure task or when compared to novel stimuli (Braunstein-Bercovitz & Lubow, 1998;Escobar, Arcediano, & Miller, 2002;Kaplan & Lubow, 2011).…”