Consideration of pigeon-holing and filtering as dysfunctional attention strategies in schizophrenia

Difficulties in the use of both filtering and pigeon-holing strategies have been suggested as partial explanations for the information processing deficits typically noted with schizophrenic subjects. The study reported here examined the operation of both of these attentional strategies in a group of schizophrenic subjects and in a group of psychiatric control subjects. Subjects were asked to identify a target syllable in the presence of several levels of competing speech. A sensory filter could be profitably invoked when the target and the competing speech were presented to separate ears. Pigeon-holing was assumed to facilitate performance when both the target and the competition occurred in both ears. Results suggested that schizophrenic subjects are relatively efficient in using filtering strategies, but have more difficulty employing pigeon-holing strategies to allocate efficiently attentional resources.