The Relationship Between Schizotypy and Latent Inhibition and Conditioned Inhibition

Abstract The Salience Hypothesis suggests that people high in symptoms of schizophrenia aberrantly assign salience. Studies of this theory are typically limited by confounds of learned irrelevance, conditioned inhibition, negative priming and novel pop-out effects. This study circumvented these confounds by using a perceptual learning paradigm to examine the effect of schizophrenia symptoms and hallucination proneness on latent inhibition and conditioned inhibition. 260 participants completed the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences and the Multi-Modality Unusual Sensory Experiences Questionnaire, before completing a perceptual learning task. In this task, participants received pre-exposure to two highly similar checkerboards, either in separate blocks or an intermixed fashion. Participants were serially presented with pairs of either pre-exposed or novel checkerboards and determined whether they were different. Participants discriminated between similar checkerboards more quickly after pre-exposure, with similar reaction times after intermixed and blocked pre-exposure. Higher unusual beliefs and lower hallucination proneness predicted poorer accuracy following blocked pre-exposure. Greater unusual beliefs and lower cognitive disorganisation predicted slower reaction times after mixed pre-exposure. These results suggest that greater unusual beliefs and lower hallucination proneness are associated with attenuated latent inhibition. Furthermore, they indicate that higher unusual beliefs and lower cognitive disorganisation are associated with attenuated conditioned inhibition.