Abstract

The present study attempted to investigate automatic processing deficits in schizophrenic patients. Three experiments were conducted to examine the development of automatic processes in schizophrenic patients and the normal on a modification of a multiple-frame search task developed by Schneider and Shiffrin(1977). On this task the category differences between the target letters or digits and distractors were varied. The findings of this study questioned prevalent assumptions that schizophrenic deficits of information processing were evident in tasks that performed with controlled processes and absent in tasks involving automatic processes. However, the results suggested that schizophrenic patients are not capable of developing automatic processes. Schizophrenics performed between-category tasks with controlled processes, whereas normal subjects did with automatic processes. This suggests that their controlled processing deficits showed in other cognitive tasks might be due to the automatic processing deficits. It is suggested that inefficient perceptual organization might be the cause of impaired automatic processing abilities.