Auditory distraction and thought disorder in chronic schizophrenic inpatients - Evidence for separate contributions by incapacity and poor allocationand a subsyndrome related to the allocation deficit

This study investigated auditory attentional processes associated with schi zophrenic thought disorder. Thirty-five chronically schizophrenic, state ho spital inpatients were assessed for thought disorder using the Thought, Lan guage, and Communication Disorders Scale (TLC) and tested in an attentional task. Two measures of attention were derived from the Digit Span Distracti on Test (DSDT) (Oltmannns, T.F., Neale, J.M., 1975. Schizophrenic performan ce when distractors are present: attentional deficit or differential task d ifficulty. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 84, 205-209), a digit recall task in which d istractor digits were interspersed with target digits. The two measures wer e Distractibility - the overall inaccuracy of recall - which measured atten tional incapacity, and Distractible Intrusion - the number of irrelevant di gits recalled - which was developed in this study to separately measure the inability to allocate attentional resources. These two measures predicted thought disorder strongly and independently. Distractibility did not signif icantly correlate with any TLC subscale. In contrast, Distractible Intrusio ns correlated with the TLC subscales Distractible Speech, Incoherence, Loss of Goal, and Word Approximations. The present findings suggest that these subtypes may comprise a distinct subsyndrome of thought disorder, character ized by a dysfunctionally low threshold for selecting appropriate speech in formation, and that an attentional allocation deficit is related to this la nguage dysfunction. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.