Latent Inhibition in Schizophrenia and Schizotypy

The Salience Hypothesis posits that aberrations in the assignment of salience culminate in hallucinations and unusual beliefs, the ‘positive symptoms’ of schizophrenia. Evidence for this comes from studies on latent inhibition, referring to the phenomenon that prior exposure to a stimulus impedes learning about the relationship between that stimulus and an outcome. This paper reviewed all published studies examining the relationship between latent inhibition and both schizophrenia and schizotypy. Contemporary literature suggests that latent inhibition is attenuated in both people with schizophrenia and those loading highly on measures of schizotypy, the multidimensional derivative of schizophrenia. This suggests that these individuals assign greater salience to stimuli than healthy controls and people scoring low on measures of schizotypy, respectively. However, several confounds limit these conclusions. Studies on people with schizophrenia are limited by the confounding effects of psychotropic medications, idiosyncratic parsing of samples, variation in dependent variables and lack of statistical power. Moreover, latent inhibition paradigms are limited by the confounding effects of learned irrelevance, conditioned inhibition, negative priming and novel pop-out effects. This review concludes with the recommendation that researchers develop novel paradigms that overcome these limitations to evaluate the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis.