The Relationship Between Schizotypy and Latent Inhibition and Conditioned Inhibition

The Salience Hypothesis suggests that people high in symptoms of schizophrenia aberrantly assign salience. Studies of this theory are typically limited by confounds of learned irrelevance, conditioned inhibition (CI), negative priming, and novel pop-out effects. This study circumvented these confounds by using a perceptual learning (PL) paradigm to examine the effect of schizophrenia symptoms and hallucination proneness (HP) on latent inhibition (LI) and CI. Two hundred sixty participants completed the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences and the Multi-Modality Unusual Sensory Experiences Questionnaire, before completing a PL task. In this task, participants received pre-exposure to 2 highly similar checkerboards, either in separate blocks or an intermixed fashion. Participants were serially presented with pairs of either pre-exposed or novel checkerboards and determined whether they were different. Participants discriminated between similar checkerboards more quickly after pre-exposure, with similar reaction times (RTs) after intermixed and blocked pre-exposure. Higher unusual beliefs and lower HP predicted poorer accuracy following blocked pre-exposure. Greater unusual beliefs and lower cognitive disorganization predicted slower RTs after mixed pre-exposure. These results suggest that greater unusual beliefs and lower HP are associated with attenuated LI. Furthermore, they indicate that higher unusual beliefs and lower cognitive disorganization are associated with attenuated CI.