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. Schizophrenic children were 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; they had a significantly greater start-up time than the MA-matched controls in the initiation of their search strategies, greater than would be predicted on the basis of merely a motor delay in button pushing. 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.
