The attentional blink in schizophrenia: Isolating the perception/attention interface
Section snippets
Participants
The participants in this study included 143 (32 female) patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia (n = 132) or schizoaffective disorder (n = 11) recruited from the outpatient treatment clinics of the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System (VAGLAHS) and from board-and-care residences in the community through staff presentations and referral. Diagnoses were confirmed using the patient version of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (First et al., 1997)
Demographic and clinical characteristics
Demographic and symptom ratings can be seen in Table 1. Schizophrenia patients were significantly older compared to healthy controls, t(221) = 5.80, p < 0.001, and the patient sample included significantly more African Americans, X2 = 13.85, p < 0.05, but there were no significant differences in gender distribution, X2 = 0.425, p > 0.05, or parental education, t(205) = 1.85, p > 0.05. As shown in Table 1, schizophrenia patients had a relatively long duration of illness and exhibited mild levels
Discussion
The current study examined the interface of visual perception and attention in schizophrenia using two RSVP tasks: a single target task to assess group differences in visual perception and a dual-target task to elicit the AB effect. The single target task showed the expected perceptual deficits in perceiving a brief target within a stream of distractors in patients. The conditional probability data from the dual target task revealed significant performance deficits in the patients but
Contributors
JKW, BB, KHN, and MFG designed this study and developed the protocol. KIM, JKW, and MFG analyzed the data and developed the interpretation of the findings. KIM, JKW, and MFG wrote the first draft of the manuscript with BB and KH providing feedback and edits. All authors have contributed to and approved the final manuscript.
Role of funding source
Funding for this study was provided by NIH Grants MH043292 and MH065707 (MFG); the NIH had no further role in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.
Conflict of interest
All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest arising from this manuscript.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Gerhard Hellemann for providing expert consultation on the statistical analyses included in this manuscript.
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Specific differences in temporal binding aspects of the attentional blink in Chromosome 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome
2018, CortexCitation Excerpt :All five of these studies reported an exaggerated or deeper AB in those with schizophrenia and four of the studies (Cheung et al., 2002; Li et al., 2002; Mathis et al., 2011, 2012) reported a protracted AB effect in schizophrenia patients compared to age-matched controls, indicating attentional impairment beyond the typical AB window of 200–500 msec. Further, the AB was reported to be exaggerated in individuals with schizophrenia relative to healthy comparison participants, even when controlling for overall poorer performance on a single-target RSVP task (Cheung et al., 2002; Mathis et al., 2011). In contrast, a recent study investigating the AB among individuals with schizophrenia (Su et al., 2015) took a different approach, attempting to control for attentional impairments that are known to be present in individuals with schizophrenia.
Is performance on probed serial recall tasks in schizophrenia related to duration of Attentional Blink?
2017, Schizophrenia Research: CognitionCitation Excerpt :Regardless of the model of AB used, there must be an encoding step that is time-dependent – a step that is also in PSR tasks and has already been identified as impaired in schizophrenia. In schizophrenia, the AB has been shown to be protracted (longer time interval between T1 and T2 needed to return to peak accuracy) as well as exaggerated (decreased accuracy at identifying the second target) (Cheung et al., 2002; Li et al., 2002; Wynn et al., 2006; Mathis et al., 2011; Mathis et al., 2012; Jahshan et al., 2014). The deficits in AB may help to explain the pattern of deficits in PSR tests in schizophrenia, i.e. a potential relationship between temporal processing deficits shown by AB and performance in PSR.
Impairment in emotional modulation of attention and memory in schizophrenia
2014, Schizophrenia ResearchCitation Excerpt :In some patient samples, however, emotion does not enhance detection of T2 stimuli, specifically those with amygdala lesions (Anderson and Phelps, 2001) and with autism spectrum disorders (Corden et al., 2008; Gaigg and Bowler, 2009). Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit a more pronounced attentional-blink effect compared to controls (Cheung et al., 2002; Li et al., 2002; Wynn et al., 2006), and at lag times considered outside the typical attentional-blink window of 200–500 ms (Mathis et al., 2011). It also appears that individuals with schizophrenia exhibit differential neural activation when initially attending (Dichter et al., 2010) and sustaining attention to emotion stimuli (Ursu et al., 2011).
Cross-diagnostic comparison of visual processing in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia
2014, Journal of Psychiatric ResearchCitation Excerpt :Participants reported the direction of the notch (up, side, or down) of the target that was surrounded by the four-dot mask. This procedure has been described in detail elsewhere (Mathis et al., 2011). This paradigm consists of a single target task that measures basic visual perception and a dual target task that elicits the attentional blink (AB) effect.
Neurophysiological sensitivity to attentional overload in patients with psychotic disorders
2013, Clinical NeurophysiologyCitation Excerpt :This could not happen here, where T1 was a letter and T2 a digit. Additionally, in Wynn et al. (2006) and Mathis et al. (2011) patients were significantly older than control subjects. Those authors stated that age did not have effects, which is in contrast to previous studies (Shih, 2009).
An electrophysiological investigation of attentional blink in schizophrenia: Separating perceptual and attentional processes
2012, International Journal of Psychophysiology