This project examines in normals basic cognitive issues arising from comparisons of the cognitive functioning of schizophrenic and normal individuals. Central to this research is the investigation of basic aspects of selective attention --how organisms selectively respond to a target stimulus when other stimuli in the environment evoke competing responses. This year a major focus has been on negative priming --the psychological tendency when an object is ignored for subsequent responses to that object to be slower or less accurate than responses to new objects. We developed and began to implement several new experimental procedures to further investigate the parameters of the phenomena and to link it to other cognitive characteristics such as working memory capacity. In addition, in keeping with our interest in normal aging we completed, and had accepted for publication in a major journal, a series of experiments which tested and cast very strong doubt on a central hypothesis in the field according to which older adults demonstrate deficits in inhibitory processing.
