206. The Impact of Reward History on Allocation of Spatial Attention in Schizophrenia
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Background: Traditionally, attention was thought to be directed by either top-down goals or bottom-up salience. Recent studies have shown that reward history of a stimulus feature can also act as a powerful attentional cue. This is of particular relevance in schizophrenia, where both motivational and attentional deficits are common. Methods: Forty-eight people with schizophrenia (PSZ) and 34 healthy controls (HC) participated in a visual target discrimination task where they had to detect if a small gap was at the top or bottom of a circle. People were initially pretrained to associate one of two colors with reward receipt. In the experimental task, 2 circles were presented. In 2 blocks, targets were equally likely to appear on the left or right. In 4 blocks, the target was 75% likely on one side. Results: Patients had slower overall RT than controls. Both groups showed statistically robust effects of spatial probability and reward history with faster RTs on rewarded color cue trials as well as more likely location trials. There were no significant 2- or 3-way interaction effects. More severe positive and negative symptoms correlated with RT slowing, but there was no selective symptom reward history effect correlations. Conclusion: Patients demonstrate RT slowing but fully normal RT facilitation on the basis of reward history and spatial probability. These results are conceptually similar to prior findings by Heerey et al (2008) showing intact reward bias effects on the discrimination task of D. Pizzagali suggesting that implicit (but not explicit) reward processing may be surprisingly intact in PSZ.
Source: Schizophrenia Bulletin
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2600538908