Evaluación de la atención dividida y estudio de la relación con el funcionamiento ejecutivo en pacientes con esquizofrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia is known to be associated with attentional deficits. Few studies have examined whether the disorder is also associated with a deficit in the ability to divide attention, and they have given contradictory results. Some have reported that patients show greater loss of performance than healthy controls when moving from single tasks to dual tasks, while others have reported similar performance loss or even that patients perform the dual task better than either task on its own. In order to help resolve this controversy, we performed a first study in which we designed a dual-task paradigm with a group of healthy individuals. This dual-task involves two tasks of equivalent difficulty that make use of different sensory modalities. In the second study, we gave this dual task to 23 patients with schizophrenia and 23 healthy individuals. Finally, we evaluated the relationship between the divided attention and executive functioning.