A confirmatory factor analysis of hyperfocusing and inhibitory control as separable cognitive domains in...

The hyperfocusing hypothesis proposes that aspects of cognitive impairment in people with schizophrenia (PSZ) can be traced to an overly narrow and intense focusing of processing resources. Although hyperfocusing can explain reduced working memory (WM) capacity and impaired performance in tasks that require distributing attention broadly, it does not easily account for impaired performance that PSZ exhibit in classic inhibitory control tasks. Here, we used a battery of cognitive experiments in a sample of PSZ (n = 83) and healthy control subjects (HCS, n = 63) to determine whether executive function and hyperfocusing reflect separate underlying factors or a single general factor. Hyperfocusing tasks were change localization (measuring WM capacity), useful field of view (measuring ability to spread attention broadly), dot probe expectancy task, and within-trial repulsion (measuring repulsive interactions between WM representations). We also included three standard inhibitory control tasks: antisaccade, stop signal, and oculomotor stop signal. Using this data set, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate whether a two-factor solution with separate hyperfocusing and inhibitory control factors provided a better fit to the data than a solution with a single generalized deficit factor. We found that the two-factor model fit the data significantly better than the one-factor model. In the two-factor solution, the hyperfocusing factor scores were significantly greater in PSZ than in HCS. In addition, hyperfocusing and inhibitory control factor scores accounted for unique variance in a measure of overall cognitive ability. These results provide statistical support for the hypothesis that hyperfocusing is a coherent latent variable that accounts for covariance across a broad range of tasks and is separable from inhibitory control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).