Schizophrenic performance when distractors are present: Attentional deficit or differential task difficulty?

Studies purporting to demonstrate an attentional dysfunction in schizophrenia have usually compared the performance of patient and control subjects in both a neutral and a distractor condition (e.g., Lawson, McGhie, & Chapman, 1967; Rappaport, 1967). Schizophrenics typically perform less adequately than the controls in both conditions. This result alone is not particularly surprising given the general inefficiency of schizophrenic s. More important is the finding that the decrement in schizophrenic performance is significantly greater in the distractor condition. This differential deficit has been taken to mean that the specific ability mediating performance on the distractor task (i.e., attention) is a particularly important area of loss, and one that may be central to our understanding of the disorder.