Intrusion of associative responses into schizophrenic conceptual performance

Two traditionally opposed but not neces-sarily mutually exclusive explanationshave been advanced to explain schizo-phrenic thinking disorder and, particularly, to explain the concept-forming disturbance. The first explanation is that there is a primary loss of ability. The second is that there is what might be called an increased distractibility, i.e., an inappropriate utilization of distracting material which is connected in various ways to the matter at hand. This first explanation is expounded most clearly in the writings of those who view the thinking disorder in terms of the "concrete-abstract " dimension. Promi-nent in this school is Goldstein (14), who conceives the loss of the "abstract attitude" as the cause not only of the lowered ability to perform on his conceptual tests but also of a wide variety of other thinking aberrations. In his view, inappropriate responses occur by default when the patient does not have avail-able a correct conceptual response. The second point of view is that the schizo-phrenic has not lost ability per se, but is pre-vented from demonstrating his ability by an over-responsiveness to distracting material. Cameron (4, 5) has most vigorously espoused this point of view in his controversy with Hanfmann and Kasanin (IS). Three previous studies (8, 9, 10) have demonstrated that over-responsiveness to various kinds of distracters accounts in part for the lowered performance of schizophrenics. It has been shown that a differential over-responsiveness to certain kinds of stimuli rather than others may account for some clin-ically observable features of the thinking disorder. In each of these studies, there was introduced, as the independent variable