Inhibitory processing in visuospatial attention in healthy adults and schizophrenic patients

This study assessed visuospatial attention in healthy adults and medicated schizophrenic patients. Participants performed a visual orientation task in which a peripheral cue was followed, at different intervals, by a target p resented either at valid or invalid locations. When the long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was used, participants were presented with either a singl e peripheral cue (single-cue condition) or two cues, the peripheral cue fol lowed by a central cue (the double-cue condition). Healthy adults showed ma rginal facilitation effects with the short SOA and similar inhibition of re turn effects with the long SOA in both single-cue and double-cue conditions . Schizophrenic individuals showed a big facilitation effect with the short SOA and normal inhibition of return with the long SOA in both cue conditio ns. Results with the short SOA replicated previous findings (Huey, E.D., We xler, B.E., 1994. Schizophrenia Research 14, 57-63) but, in contrast, we di d not observe blunted inhibition of return with the long SOA. An inspection of the differences in the procedures used in both studies may help both to account for the discrepancies and to reveal what processes involved in vis uospatial attention are affected in schizophrenia. (C) 1999 Elsevier Scienc e B.V. All rights reserved.