Schizophrenia and automatic processing: an exploratory study.

This study deals with the schizophrenic deficit as one of automatic processing. To test the idea, a special experimental task was designed on which 21 schizophrenics, 21 depressives, and 21 normal subjects had to complete a series of simple geometric figures. When the subjects had thoroughly learned this activity, another information source, a brief story, was introduced, and the subjects had to pay attention to the story while they did the task. Two dependent variables were considered, execution time and performance. There were no differences among the three groups in the first experimental condition; but in the second condition, when the distractor was introduced, schizophrenics needed more time to do the task and their performance was noticeably worse than those of both normals and depressives. This outcome is explained in terms of a failure in the internal mechanisms which regulate the automatic, parallel, and unconscious processing.