Spatial attention in hypothetically psychosis-prone college students

This study tested the hypothesis that psychosis-prone individuals show patterns of visual search that suggest a lateralized cerebral hemispheric abnormality, similar to one hypothesized by Venables (1980) to underlie cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. Self-report measures of psychiatric vulnerability were completed by 881 college students. Experimental subjects (n = 73) were those with high scores on one of four psychosis-proneness scales. Control subjects (n = 33) scored within 0.5 SD of the mean on all scales. Subjects were tested using verbal and nonverbal visual search tasks designed to detect abnormalities in the spatial distribution of attention. When searching random arrays of nonverbal stimuli, 53% of the experimental subjects used an erratic search strategy similar to that typically observed in right-brain-damaged patients, compared with 23% of controls. The most deviant search patterns were shown by subjects who scored high on Physical Anhedonia and Perceptual Aberration-Magical Ideation. The results suggest that early development of schizophrenic disorder might be associated with dysfunction of right-hemispheric mechanisms of attentional control.