Abstract
Attentional filtering has long been suggested to be a core deficit of schizophrenia. Recent work (Luck, Leonard, et al., 2019) has emphasized the important distinction between attentional control, which involves the voluntary selection of a particular stimulus for focused processing, and implementation of selection, which involves the mechanisms that enhance the stimulus selected via filtering processes (p. 1001). We recorded electroencephalography data from people with schizophrenia (PSZ), their first-degree relatives (REL) and healthy controls (CTRL) during performance of a resistance to attentional capture task that tapped attentional control and implementation of selection measured during a brief period of attentional maintenance. Event-related potentials (ERPs) during attentional control and maintenance of attention both yielded evidence for diminished neural responding in PSZ. But it was only the ERPs during attentional control that predicted performance on the visual attention task for PSZ – which was not the case for REL and CTRL. Visual attention performance for CTRL was best predicted by ERPs during attentional maintenance. These results support the idea that poor initial voluntary attentional control is more central to attentional dysfunction in schizophrenia than difficulty implementing selection (e.g., resistance to attentional capture by visual distractors). Nevertheless, weak neural modulations indicative of impaired early attentional maintenance in people with schizophrenia challenge notions of increased intensity of focus or “hyperfocusing” in the disorder. Improvement of the initial control of attention may be a productive target for cognitive remediation interventions for schizophrenia.