ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, viewed overall; the preliminary findings of the high-risk studies suggest that childhood attentional deficits may well be early warning signals of pathology in adolescence and possibly of schizophrenia in adulthood. It presents data from the program of studies being conducted at New York State Psychiatric Institute that indicate that attentional dysfunctions do, in fact, predict adolescent behavioral disturbances, which in turn may be reflective of eventual schizophrenia. Measures of reaction time have been perhaps the most widely used procedure in the experimental study of schizophrenia and have proved to be effective in detecting attentional deficits in affected adults. Clinical research has indicated that schizophrenic patients experience feelings of being flooded by stimuli from the surrounding environment and of not being able to selectively screen irrelevant stimuli out of conscious awareness. Two types of distraction paradigms have been used in high-risk research— auditory distraction combined with a visual task and auditory distraction combined with an auditory task.
