Attention to Irrelevant Cues Is Related to Positive Symptoms in Schizophrenia
Open accessAbstract
Many modern learning theories assume that the amount of attention to a cue depends on how well that cue predicted important events in the past. Schizophrenia is associated with deficits in attention and recent theories of psychosis have argued that positive symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations are related to a failure of selective attention. However, evidence demonstrating that attention to irrelevant cues is related to positive symptoms in schizophrenia is lacking. We used a novel method of measuring attention to nonpredictive (and thus irrelevant) cues in a causal learning test (Le Pelley ME, McLaren IP. Learned associability and associative change in human causal learning. Q J Exp Psychol B. 2003;56:68-79) to assess whether healthy adults and people with schizophrenia discriminate previously predictive and nonpredictive cues. In a series of experiments with independent samples, we demonstrated: (1) when people with schizophrenia who had severe positive symptoms successfully distinguished between predictive and nonpredictive cues during training, they failed to discriminate between predictive and nonpredictive cues relative to healthy adults during subsequent testing and (2) learning about nonpredictive cues was correlated with more severe positive symptoms scores in schizophrenia. These results suggest that positive symptoms of schizophrenia are related to increased attention to nonpredictive cues during causal learning. This deficit in selective attention results in learning irrelevant causal associations and may be the basis of positive symptoms in schizophrenia.
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Schizophrenia patients with positive symptoms have significant disturbances in sensory-motor gating, shifting, spatial focus, and cue detection.
“because schizophrenia patients with positive symptoms have significant disturbances in sensory-motor gating, shifting, spatial focus, and cue detection [185].”
From Comparative Effectiveness of Multiple Exercise Interventions in the Treatment of Mental Health Disorders: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis (2022) · cites this paper as [185]
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- Authors
- Morris, R., Griffiths, O., Le Pelley, M. E., & Weickert, T. W.
- Affiliations
- UNSW Sydney (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Morris, R.
- Venue
- Schizophrenia Bulletin
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2012-01-20
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 575-582
- ISSN
- 0586-7614 (ISSN-L)
- 1745-1701
- PMC
- PMC3627774
- OpenAlex
- W2126168108
- Cited by
- 105
- References
- 43
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 5.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nc
- Locations
- Schizophrenia Bulletin (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Sylvia and Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation
- Pratt Foundation
- Neuroscience Research Australia
- University of New South Wales
- NSW Ministry of Health
- Ramsay Health Care
- Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank
- Medical Research Council
- National Health and Medical Research Council (568807)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Schizophrenia research and treatment
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Mental Health and Psychiatry
- Keywords
- schizophrenia, positive symptoms
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Association Learning, Attention, Cognition Disorders, Cues, Female, Humans, Male, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia, Schizophrenic Psychology, Case-Control Studies
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