Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T02:41:13.528Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Distractibility in Schizophrenia and Organic Cerebral Disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

J. S. Lawson ,
Andrew Mcghie  and
James Chapman
J. S. Lawson
Affiliation:
From the Department of Psychiatry, University of St. Andrews, Queen's College, Dundee, and the Royal Dundee Liff Hospital
Andrew Mcghie
Affiliation:
From the Department of Psychiatry, University of St. Andrews, Queen's College, Dundee, and the Royal Dundee Liff Hospital
James Chapman
Affiliation:
From the Department of Psychiatry, University of St. Andrews, Queen's College, Dundee, and the Royal Dundee Liff Hospital
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Recent investigations of cognitive disorder in schizophrenia (Payne and Hewlett, 1960; Payne, Caird and Laverty, 1964) have indicated that schizophrenic performance in cognitive tests is characterized by a tendency to use very loose, “overinclusive” concepts. This phenomenon which Cameron (1944) termed “overinclusive thinking”, has been re-interpreted by Payne (1961) in terms of an impairment of a hypothetical filter mechanism which normally excludes irrelevant stimuli from consciousness and so allows attention to be directed towards the task in hand. McGhie and Chapman (1961) and Chapman (1966) have presented clinical evidence based on the subjective reports of schizophrenic patients supporting the hypothesis that a primary disorder in this disease is an impairment in the selective and inhibitory functions of attention. Chapman and McGhie (1962) and McGhie, Chapman and Lawson (1965a and b) have substantiated and elaborated this clinically derived hypothesis in an experimental setting where the subjects were required to perform various psychomotor and short-term memory tasks with and without distracting stimuli. The results of these investigations, while supporting the hypothesis in a general way, were nevertheless equivocal. The distraction effect in schizophrenia appeared to be confined to those situations where adequate performance involved the processing of a substantial amount of information. This finding was explained in terms of Broadbent's (1958) theory of the human operator as a limited capacity information channel. It appeared that distraction affected the performance of schizophrenic patients only in situations where the limited information channel was fully occupied in handling relevant aspects of the task—for example, in tracking and short term memory tests. Under these conditions the assimilation of irrelevant information produces overloading of the information channel and a consequent breakdown of performance. On the other hand, in those tasks requiring little information processing—for example, in repetitive psychomotor tasks—the channel is operating well below capacity, the assimilation of irrelevant information does not lead to overloading, and consequently does not have any detrimental effect on performance. An analogue of this situation occurs in normal subjects, in whom division of attention between two sources does not necessarily lead to impairment of performance if the informational requirements of each source are small and total information load does not exceed the critical limit (Broadbent and Herron, 1962). For the schizophrenic patient attention tends to be divided between the relevant and the irrelevant, yet impairment in performance need not occur if the informational requirements of the task are kept small.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 113 , Issue 498 , May 1967 , pp. 527 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1967 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Averbach, E., and Coriell, A. S. (1961). “Short term memory in vision.” Bell. Sys. Tech. J., 40, 309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bleuler, M. (1963). “Conception of schizophrenia within the last fifty years and today.” Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., 56, 945.Google Scholar
Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and Communication. London: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Broadbent, D. E. and Herron, A. (1962). “Effects of subsidiary tasks on performance involving immediate memory by younger and older men.” Brit. J. Psychol., 53, 189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, N. (1944). “Experimental analysis of schizophrenic thinking.” In: Language and Thought in Schizophrenia. (Ed. Kasanin, ). California: University Press.Google Scholar
Chapman, J. (1966). “The early symptoms of schizophrenia.” Brit. J. Psychiat., 112, 225.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chapman, J. and McGhie, A. (1962). “A comparative study of disordered attention in schizophrenia.” J. ment. Sci., 108, 455.Google Scholar
Conrad, R. (1964). “Acoustic confusions in immediate memory.” Brit. J. Psychol., 55, 75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawson, J. S. (1962). “A study of the effects of auditory distraction on auditory perception in schizophrenia.” M.A. Thesis, University of St. Andrews.Google Scholar
Lindquist, E. F. (1953). Design and Analysis of Experiments in Psychology and Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.Google Scholar
McGhie, A., and Chapman, J. (1961). “Disorders of attention and perception in early schizophrenia.” Brit. J. med. Psychol., 34, 103.Google Scholar
McGhie, A., Chapman, J., and Lawson, J. S. (1965a). “The effect of distraction on schizophrenic performance: (1) Perception and immediate memory.” Brit. J. Psychiat., in, 383.Google Scholar
McGhie, A., Chapman, J., and Lawson, J. S. (1965b). “The effect of distraction on schizophrenic performance: (2) Psychomotor ability.” Ibid., 111, 391.Google Scholar
McGhie, A., Chapman, J., and Lawson, J. S. (1965c). “Changes in immediate memory with age.” Brit. J. Psychol., 56, 69.Google Scholar
Payne, R. (1961). “Cognitive abnormalities.” In: Handbook of Abnormal Psychology. (Ed. Eysenck, H. J.). New York: Basic Books Inc.Google Scholar
Payne, R., Cairo, W. K., and Laverty, S. G. (1964). “Over-inclusive thinking and delusions in schizophrenic patients.” J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 68, 562.Google Scholar
Payne, R., and Hewlett, J. H. G. (1960). “Thought disorder in psychotic patients.” In: Experiments in Personality. Vol. II (Ed. Eysenck, H. J.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Speith, W., Curtis, J. E., and Webster, J. C. (1954). “Responding to one of two simultaneous messages.” J. acoust. soc. Amer., 26, 391.Google Scholar
Speith, W., and Webster, J. C. (1955). “Listening to two differentially filtered competing voice messages.” Ibid., 27, 866.Google Scholar
Sperling, G. (1960). “The information available in brief visual presentations.” Psychol. Monogr., 74, 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperling, G. (1963). “A model for visual memory tasks.” Human Factors, 5, 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stilson, D. W., and Kopell, B. S. (1964). “The recognition of visual signals in the presence of visual noise by psychotic patients.” J. nerv. ment. Dis., 139, 209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weckowicz, T. E. (1960). “Perception of hidden pictures by schizophrenic patients.” A.M.A. Arch. gen. Psychiat. 2, 521.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.