Hyperfocusing of attention on goal-related information in schizophrenia: Evidence from electrophysiology

Schizophrenia clearly involves impairments of attention, but the precise nature of these impairments has been difficult to determine. One possibility is that the deficit in attention is a secondary consequence of a deficit in goal maintenance. However, recent research suggests that people with schizophrenia (PSZ) actually focus attention more strongly on objects containing goal-relevant features. To test these competing hypotheses, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from PSZ (N = 20) and healthy control subjects (HCS; N = 20) while they looked for a particular target color at fixation and tried to ignore lateral distractors that sometimes matched the target color (target-color distractors). Goal maintenance was made trivially easy by the continual presentation of a goal reminder. We found that HCS were able to successfully suppress target-color distractors (leading to a distractor positivity ERP component), whereas PSZ focused attention on these items (leading to an N2-posterior-contralateral ERP component). This suggests that, when maintaining a task set, PSZ engage in aberrant focusing of attention, or hyperfocusing, on goal-relevant features. (PsycINFO Database Record