One hundred seventy-seven college students completed personality measures including the MMPI-168, and reality-discrimination measures including a timed discrimination task developed by the first author. Previously on such a timed task, normal subjects discriminated percepts more quickly from images of perceptual vividness than from faint images, as if they registered more “central innervation” during more vivid imaging. Presently, on each of the four practice trials and forty-four timed trials in Task 1, subjects fixated on a dot, perceived a stimulus to one side, imaged an identical stimulus on the other side and rated its vividness while continuing to image. Then, either the dot became a P and subjects pressed a button on the side of the percept, as quickly as possible, or the dot became an I and subjects pressed a button on the side of the image. The slope, within subject, of image/percept discrimination times over image-vividness ratings was computed for the 149 subjects who rated some of their forty-four images more vividly than others. It was predicted and found that self-described hallucinators and MMPI-defined paranoids discriminated percepts less quickly from vivid images, as if the greater “central innervation” behind more vivid images is not registered by psychosis-prone subjects.
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