Myles Liam, Garrison Jane, Cheke Lucy
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Schizophr Bull Open. 2023 Nov 17;4(1):sgad026. doi: 10.1093/schizbullopen/sgad026. eCollection 2023 Jan.
The Salience Hypothesis posits that aberrations in the assignment of salience culminate in hallucinations and unusual beliefs, the "positive symptoms" of schizophrenia. Evidence for this comes from studies on latent inhibition (LI), referring to the phenomenon that prior exposure to a stimulus impedes learning about the relationship between that stimulus and an outcome.
This article reviewed all published studies examining the relationship between LI and both schizophrenia and schizotypy.
Contemporary literature suggests that LI is attenuated in both people with schizophrenia and those loading highly on measures of schizotypy, the multidimensional derivative of schizophrenia. This suggests that these individuals assign greater salience to stimuli than healthy controls and people scoring low on measures of schizotypy, respectively. However, several confounds limit these conclusions. Studies on people with schizophrenia are limited by the confounding effects of psychotropic medications, idiosyncratic parsing of samples, variation in dependent variables, and lack of statistical power. Moreover, LI paradigms are limited by the confounding effects of learned irrelevance, conditioned inhibition, negative priming, and novel pop-out effects.
This review concludes with the recommendation that researchers develop novel paradigms that overcome these limitations to evaluate the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis.
显著性假设认为，显著性分配异常最终会导致幻觉和异常信念，即精神分裂症的“阳性症状”。这一观点的证据来自对潜伏抑制（LI）的研究，潜伏抑制是指先前接触过某一刺激会妨碍对该刺激与某一结果之间关系的学习。
本文回顾了所有已发表的研究，这些研究考察了潜伏抑制与精神分裂症及分裂型人格之间的关系。
当代文献表明，精神分裂症患者以及在分裂型人格（精神分裂症的多维衍生物）测量中得分较高的人，其潜伏抑制都会减弱。这表明，与健康对照组和在分裂型人格测量中得分较低的人相比，这些个体分别赋予刺激更高的显著性。然而，一些混杂因素限制了这些结论。对精神分裂症患者的研究受到精神药物的混杂效应、样本的特殊分类、因变量的变化以及统计效力不足的限制。此外，潜伏抑制范式受到习得性无关、条件性抑制、负启动和新奇突显效应的混杂效应的限制。
本综述最后建议研究人员开发新的范式，以克服这些局限性，从而评估显著性假设的预测。
