Objective: Previous studies of attention/information processing impairments in schizophre-P atients with schizophrenia exhibit impaired ability to select and shift attention and to process information under conditions of information overload (1-4). It has been hypothesized that these attention/information processing impairments represent both vulnerability markers for the development of schizophrenia and a direct expression of the pathophysiology of schizophrenia (3-5). However, despite the central role that the study of these impairments may play in our understanding of schizophrenia, there is relatively little known about the relationship of attention/information processing impairments to the three specific symptom complexes observed in schizophrenia, i.e., hallucinations and delusions, positive formal thought disorder, and deficit/negative symptoms (6, 7).Previous studies have suggested that there may be unique relationships between positive and negative symptoms and specific attention/information processing impairments (8, 9). Green and Walker reported that negative symptoms, but not positive symptoms, were associated with greater susceptibility to backward masking (10, 11). Negative symptoms also predicted the length of the critical interstimulus interval, a measure of threshold sensitivity, required for detection of the target stimulus (10, 11). They suggested that negative symptoms are associated with an impairment in perceptual organization, resulting in a decreased ability to process visual information. Braff also reported that patients with negative symptoms performed more poorly on the backward masking task and that negative symptoms were associated with prolonged critical interstimulus intervals (12). Cornblatt et al. (13) assessed the relationship between positive and negative symptoms and measures of distractibility and ability to process auditory information under conditions of informa-