Shadowing on the basis of contextual information in individuals with schizotypal personality

The Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ; Raine, 1991) was administered to 100 volunteer undergraduates; the 20 with the highest and the 20 with the lowest scores were selected for further study. They undertook a shadowing task in which two passages of prose were presented simultaneously and binaurally, being distinguishable only by their content. Participants were required to repeat (shadow) one of the passages and to ignore the other (the distractor). Performance of the two groups differed with participants having high scores on the SPQ showing a significantly greater tendency to make intrusion errors (to repeat words from the distractor passage). It is suggested that schizotypy is characterized by a dysfunction in the normal response-selection mechanism of attention with the consequence that the response bias established by the semantic content of the input is insufficiently selective, extending to items that are only distantly associated with those present in the input.