Response selection impairment in schizophrenia transcends sensory and motor modalities

Response selection dysfunction contributes to processing speed impairment in schizophrenia. However, it is unclear if response selection impairment transcends sensory and motor modalities or is modality specific. To address this question, healthy subjects and individuals with schizophrenia completed reaction time (RT) experiments with different combinations of sensory cues (i.e. visual, auditory) and motor response (i.e. manual, vocal). We found that response selection impairment in schizophrenia was present regardless of the sensory and motor modality of the tasks and correlated with performance on neuropsychological tests of processing speed. These results implicate dysfunction of amodal response selection brain regions in schizophrenia. Interventions that reduce the length of response selection stage processing may improve processing speed in schizophrenia.