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Abstract
Reality monitoring and selective attention have been repeatedly shown to be impaired
in schizophrenia. Positive symptomatology has been found to be associated with deficits
in both reality monitoring and selective attention. Therefore, a direct link between
reality monitoring and selective attention was hypothesized. Thirty-two schizophrenic
patients and 32 normal controls were administered the Stroop test as a measure of
selective attention along with a test of three indices of reality monitoring, involving
discrimination of: events vs. non-events, self- vs. externally-generated events, and
oral vs. pictorial sources. A global memory test was administered for comparison.
Results showed that schizophrenic patients were impaired in both reality monitoring
and selective attention, and that these two were significantly correlated with each
other in the schizophrenic sample. On the contrary, selective attention was not significantly
correlated with memory efficiency in either group. Further, multiple regression analyses
in schizophrenic patients showed that only selective attention contributed significantly
to the variance in reality monitoring measures. Therefore, the results argue in favor
of a specific role of a selective attention deficit in reality monitoring failure
in schizophrenia.