Visual search performance by paranoid and chronic undifferentiated schizophrenics

Disturbances in attention are among the most frequent cognitive abnormalities in schizophrenia. Recent research has suggested that some schizophrenics have difficulty with visual tracking, which is suggestive of attentional deficits. To investigate differential visual-search performance by schizophrenics, 15 chronic undifferentiated and 15 paranoid schizophrenics were compared with 15 normals on two tests measuring visual search in a systematic and an unsystematic stimulus mode. Chronic schizophrenics showed difficulty with both kinds of visual-search tasks. In contrast, paranoids had only a deficit in the systematic visual-search task. Their ability for visual search in an unsystematized stimulus array was equivalent to that of normals. Although replication and cross-validation is needed to confirm these findings, it appears that the two tests of visual search may provide a useful ancillary method for differential diagnosis between these two types of schizophrenia.