This project was designed to add to the growing body of literature concerning core cognitive impairments in schizophrenic children. Both adult and child schizophrenics show a wide range of impairments on a variety of cognitive tasks. However, if these studies are examined carefully, it does not appear that we have been able to identify a specific process that is consistently impaired in schizophrenic individuals. This suggests that the impairment is more systemic, not simply contained within a small set of isolable information processing functions. In this study, based on the Feature Integration Theory of Attention by Treisman and Gelade, the ability of the schizophrenic child to recognize the task relevance of, and engage in, serial and parallel modes of visual search is examined. The data reveal that schizophrenic children are as competent as MA-matched control children in their use of a parallel visual search strategy and a serial visual search strategy, and in their recognition of the situations under which each is the optimal strategy. Importantly, the data also reveal that schizophrenic children have a significantly greater start-up time then the MA-matched controls in the initiation of their search strategies. This difference is in the range of 480 msecs. This is much greater than would be predicted on the basis of merely a motor delay in button pushing. These results suggest that the schizophrenic individual does not have a specific information processing deficit, but rather a global deficit in time to initiate the operation of any information processing strategy, be it an automatic strategy or an attention demanding strategy. Such a deficit would be apparent in all tasks requiring speeded information processing, and in real-time processing of information.
