Schizophrenia: An Information Processing Model

Abstract

There is a wealth of literature associating schizophrenia with disorders of information processing and attention. This paper draws together knowledge from experimental cognitive psychology and examines how both research findings and the clinical manifestations of schizophrenia can be accommodated by an information processing paradigm. An attentional model of schizophrenia is proposed in which disorders in the perception of information are related to dysfunction at the level of preattentive processes. This is seen as one crucial difference between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, both of which demonstrate failures of sensory gating and filter mechanisms in the acquisition and processing of inputs. Commonalities between the two disorders are thus addressed. Certain psychopathological phenomena in schizophrenia, particularly negative symptoms (‘inhibition’), hallucinations and delusions, are seen as compensatory operations of a disordered information processing system. The model has heuristic value and is able to account for, and coherently organise, the variability which continues to confound research in schizophrenia.