Rossi-Arnaud Clelia, Spataro Pietro, Saraulli Daniele, Mulligan Neil W, Sciarretta Antonio, Marques Valeria R S, Cestari Vincenzo
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome.
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2014 Aug;123(3):588-97. doi: 10.1037/a0037194. Epub 2014 Jun 16.
The present study reports 2 experiments examining the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE) in schizophrenic patients and matched healthy controls, using visual and verbal materials. The ABE refers to the surprising finding that, in a divided attention condition, images and words encoded with targets are remembered better than images and words encoded with distractors. Unlike controls (who showed the typical ABE), schizophrenic patients reported no memory advantage for stimuli presented together with targets in the divided attention condition. On the other hand, the interference effect on the recognition of stimuli presented with distractors was not exacerbated in patients (as compared with controls). In line with the dual-task interaction model proposed by Swallow and Jiang (2013), the absence of a significant facilitation indicates that schizophrenic patients have a deficit in the process of attentional enhancement triggered by target detection. A number of neural mechanisms potentially underlying this impairment are discussed, as well as implications for the characterization of the attentional deficits involved in schizophrenia.
本研究报告了两项实验，使用视觉和语言材料，检验精神分裂症患者及匹配的健康对照者的注意增强效应（ABE）。ABE指的是一个惊人的发现：在分心注意条件下，与目标一起编码的图像和单词比与干扰物一起编码的图像和单词记忆得更好。与对照组（呈现出典型的ABE）不同，精神分裂症患者在分心注意条件下，对于与目标一起呈现的刺激物并未表现出记忆优势。另一方面，患者对于与干扰物一起呈现的刺激物识别的干扰效应并未加剧（与对照组相比）。与Swallow和Jiang（2013）提出的双任务交互模型一致，缺乏显著的促进作用表明精神分裂症患者在目标检测触发的注意增强过程中存在缺陷。文中讨论了可能导致这种损伤的一些神经机制，以及对精神分裂症所涉及的注意缺陷特征的影响。
