Schizophrenia and Reward and Selective Attention Unimpaired

Bansal, Robinson, Geng, Leonard, Hahn, Luck, and Gold (2018) Investigated the effects of learning on selective attention in patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects. Two different kinds of learning were investigated. The first was the capability of the value of a reward that was associated with a particular color, and the second was the patients' capability to relate a target stimulus with a particular location. It was found that both kinds of control of attention were generally not impaired in patients with schizophrenia. According to the authors, patients with schizophrenia can both use the associations of reward as well as spatial probability to make their reaction time speed quicker. Thus reward related attentional control was found intact in schizophrenia (Bansal et al., 2018).