Abstract
Schizophrenia is typically characterized by impairments in selective attention. However, recent evidence seems to counterintuitively show that people with schizophrenia (PSZ) exhibit superior attentional selection compared with healthy control subjects, an intriguing phenomenon known as hyperfocusing. Such supranormal attention is believed to underlie multiple kinds of cognitive impairments observed in PSZ, and thus exploring this remarkable phenomenon holds promise for inspiring innovative treatments aimed at addressing cognitive deficits in PSZ. Here, in this case–control study comprising four independent experiments, we aimed to investigate two central questions regarding this phenomenon. First, we sought to investigate whether hyperfocusing on the relevant information would be accompanied with hyperfiltering on irrelevant information, by adopting tasks wherein participants were asked to focus on one feature (that is, color) of an object while ignoring another (that is, shape). Another important objective is to understand how such supranormal attention unfolds over the course of cognitive processing by manipulating the time course. Our research reveals that hyperfocusing on relevant information coincides with greater filtering (that is, hyperfiltering) of irrelevant information from the same object. Additionally, our research shows that hyperfocusing develops through continuously enhancing the relevant information and progressively weakening the irrelevant information over time. Crucially, these key findings are replicated and generalized across different designs and research paradigms, underscoring the robustness and replicability of our study. These convincing findings extend our understanding of cognitive mechanisms behind hyperfocusing.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$59.00 per year
only $4.92 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The participants did not consent to the sharing of the raw data to the public. However, deidentified individual participant data can be found on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/y76xz/). Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
All data analyses used readily available programs (for example, Microsoft Excel).
References
Kahn, R. S. & Keefe, R. S. Schizophrenia is a cognitive illness: time for a change in focus. JAMA Psychiatry 70, 1107–1112 (2013).
Guo, J. Y., Ragland, J. D. & Carter, C. S. Memory and cognition in schizophrenia. Mol. Psychiatry 24, 633–642 (2019).
Minzenberg, M. J. & Carter, C. S. Developing treatments for impaired cognition in schizophrenia. Trends Cogn. Sci. 16, 35–42 (2012).
Barch, D. M. & Ceaser, A. Cognition in schizophrenia: core psychological and neural mechanisms. Trends Cogn. Sci. 16, 27–34 (2012).
Kreither, J. et al. Electrophysiological evidence for hyperfocusing of spatial attention in schizophrenia. J. Neurosci. 37, 3813–3823 (2017).
Luck, S. J., Hahn, B., Leonard, C. J. & Gold, J. M. The hyperfocusing hypothesis: a new account of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. Schizophr Bull. 45, 991–1000 (2019).
Leonard, C. J. et al. Toward the neural mechanisms of reduced working memory capacity in schizophrenia. Cereb. Cortex 23, 1582–1592 (2013).
Luria, R., Balaban, H., Awh, E. & Vogel, E. K. The contralateral delay activity as a neural measure of visual working memory. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 62, 100–108 (2016).
Mayer, J. S., Fukuda, K., Vogel, E. K. & Park, S. Impaired contingent attentional capture predicts reduced working memory capacity in schizophrenia. PLoS ONE 7, e48586 (2012).
Hahn, B. et al. Visuospatial attention in schizophrenia: deficits in broad monitoring. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 121, 119–128 (2012).
Gray, B. E. et al. Relationships between divided attention and working memory impairment in people with schizophrenia. Schizophr. Bull. 40, 1462–1471 (2014).
Leonard, C. J., Robinson, B. M., Hahn, B., Luck, S. J. & Gold, J. M. Altered spatial profile of distraction in people with schizophrenia. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 126, 1077–1086 (2017).
Gold, J. M. et al. People with schizophrenia show enhanced cognitive costs of maintaining a single item in working memory. Psychol. Med. 50, 867–873 (2020).
Leonard, C. J., Robinson, B. M., Hahn, B., Gold, J. M. & Luck, S. J. Increased influence of a previously attended feature in people with schizophrenia. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 129, 305–311 (2020).
Luck, S. J. et al. Hyperfocusing in schizophrenia: evidence from interactions between working memory and eye movements. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 123, 783–795 (2014).
Bansal, S. et al. Oculomotor inhibition and location priming in schizophrenia. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 130, 651–664 (2021).
Sawaki, R. et al. Hyperfocusing of attention on goal-related information in schizophrenia: evidence from electrophysiology. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 126, 106–116 (2017).
Hahn, B., Harvey, A. N., Gold, J. M., Ross, T. J. & Stein, E. A. Load-dependent hyperdeactivation of the default mode network in people with schizophrenia. Schizophr. Res. 185, 190–196 (2017).
Hahn, B., Robinson, B. M., Leonard, C. J., Luck, S. J. & Gold, J. M. Posterior parietal cortex dysfunction is central to working memory storage and broad cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. J. Neurosci. 38, 8378–8387 (2018).
Carrasco, M. Visual attention: the past 25 years. Vision Res. 51, 1484–1525 (2011).
Eriksen, C. W. & St James, J. D. Visual attention within and around the field of focal attention: a zoom lens model. Percept. Psychophys. 40, 225–240 (1986).
Eriksen, C. W. & Yeh, Y. Y. Allocation of attention in the visual field. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 11, 583–597 (1985).
Posner, M. I. Orienting of attention. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 32, 3–25 (1980).
Hahn, B. et al. Impaired filtering and hyperfocusing: neural evidence for distinct selective attention abnormalities in people with schizophrenia. Cereb. Cortex 32, 1950–1964 (2022).
Wyble, B. et al. Understanding visual attention with RAGNAROC: a reflexive attention gradient through neural AttRactOr competition. Psychol. Rev. 127, 1163–1198 (2020).
Soto, D., Hodsoll, J., Rotshtein, P. & Humphreys, G. W. Automatic guidance of attention from working memory. Trends Cogn. Sci. 12, 342–348 (2008).
Olivers, C. N., Peters, J., Houtkamp, R. & Roelfsema, P. R. Different states in visual working memory: when it guides attention and when it does not. Trends Cogn. Sci. 15, 327–334 (2011).
Dowd, E. W., Pearson, J. M. & Egner, T. Decoding working memory content from attentional biases. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 24, 1252–1260 (2017).
Mallett, R. & Lewis-Peacock, J. A. Behavioral decoding of working memory items inside and outside the focus of attention. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1424, 256–267 (2018).
Fu, Y., Zhou, Y., Zhou, J., Shen, M. & Chen, H. More attention with less working memory: the active inhibition of attended but outdated information. Sci. Adv. 7, eabj4985 (2021).
Hollingworth, A., Matsukura, M. & Luck, S. J. Visual working memory modulates rapid eye movements to simple onset targets. Psychol. Sci. 24, 790–796 (2013).
Gao, Z. et al. Object-based encoding in visual working memory: evidence from memory-driven attentional capture. Sci. Rep. 9, 22822 (2016).
Soto, D. & Humphreys, G. W. Automatic selection of irrelevant object features through working memory: evidence for top-down attentional capture. Exp. Psychol. 56, 165–172 (2009).
Ecker, U. K. H., Maybery, M. & Zimmer, H. D. Binding of intrinsic and extrinsic features in working memory. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 142, 218–234 (2013).
Gao, T., Gao, Z., Li, J., Sun, Z. & Shen, M. The perceptual root of object-based storage: an interactive model of perception and visual working memory. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 37, 1803–1823 (2011).
Hyun, J. S., Woodman, G. F., Vogel, E. K., Hollingworth, A. & Luck, S. J. The comparison of visual working memory representations with perceptual inputs. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 35, 1140–1160 (2009).
Coch, D., Sanders, L. D. & Neville, H. J. An event-related potential study of selective auditory attention in children and adults. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 17, 605–622 (2005).
Fu, Y. et al. Attention with or without working memory: mnemonic reselection of attended information. Trends Cogn. Sci. 27, 1111–1122 (2023).
van Ede, F. & Nobre, A. C. Turning attention inside out: how working memory serves behavior. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 74, 137–165 (2023).
Lucas, C. G., Bridgers, S., Griffiths, T. L. & Gopnik, A. When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships. Cognition 131, 284–299 (2014).
Gualtieri, S. & Finn, A. S. The sweet spot: when children’s developing abilities, brains, and knowledge make them better learners than adults. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 17, 1322–1338 (2022).
Schneider, S. J. Selective attention in schizophrenia. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 85, 167–173 (1976).
Wishner, J. & Wahl, O. Dichotic listening in schizophrenia. J. Consult. Clin. Psychol. 42, 538–546 (1974).
Wahl, O. Schizophrenic patterns of dichotic shadowing performance. J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. l63, 401–407 (1976).
Hahn, B. et al. Failure of schizophrenia patients to overcome salient distractors during working memory encoding. Biol. Psychiatry 68, 603–609 (2010).
Erickson, M. A. et al. Impaired working memory capacity is not caused by failures of selective attention in schizophrenia. Schizophr. Bull. 41, 366–373 (2015).
Luck, S. J., Leonard, C. J., Hahn, B. & Gold, J. M. Is attentional filtering impaired in schizophrenia? Schizophr. Bull. 45, 1001–1011 (2019).
Woodman, G. F. & Luck, S. J. Do the contents of visual working memory automatically influence attentional selection during visual search? J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 33, 363–377 (2007).
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A. G. & Buchner, A. G*Power 3: a flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behav. Res. Methods 39, 175–191 (2007).
The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines (World Health Organization, 1992).
Kay, S. R., Fiszbein, A. & Opler, L. A. The positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS) for schizophrenia. Schizophr. Bull. 13, 261–276 (1987).
Cooper, J. E. & Sartorius, N. Mental Disorders in China: Results of the National Epidemiological Survey in 12 Areas (Glasgow Gaskell Press, 1996).
Leucht, S., Samara, M., Heres, S. & Davis, J. M. Dose equivalents for antipsychotic drugs: the DDD method. Schizophr. Bull. 42, S90–S94 (2016).
Brainard, D. H. The psychophysics toolbox. Spat. Vis. 10, 433–436 (1997).
Kleiner, M. et al. What’s new in psychtoolbox-3. Perception 36, 1–16 (2007).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Science and Technology Innovation 2030 ‘Brain Science and Brain-like Research’ major project (no. 2022ZD0210800) awarded to H.C. from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 32171046 awarded to H.C. and no. 32071044 awarded to M.S.), the Emerging Enhancement Technology under Perspective of Humanistic Philosophy from the National Office for Philosophy and Social Science (no. 20&ZD045) awarded to H.C and the Ningbo Top Medical and Health Research Program (no. 2022030410) from the Health Commission of Ningbo awarded to D.Z. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
J.L. and H.C. had full access to all the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. Concept and design: M.S. and H.C. Acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data: J.L, B.-l.Z., D.Z., Y.F., X.H., L.C., H.L., J.Z., E.T., Y.L., C.G., M.S. and H.C. Drafting of the paper: J.L., Y.F. and H.C. Critical revision of the paper for important intellectual content: all authors. Statistical analysis: J.L., L.C., E.T. and Y.L. Obtained funding: M.S. and H.C. Administrative, technical or material support: B.-l.Z., D.Z. and H.C. Supervision: M.S. and H.C.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Mental Health thanks James Gold, Carly Leonard and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, results for experiment 3 and Fig. 1.
Source data
Source Data Fig. 2
Statistical source data. Experiments 1a and 1b. Source Data Fig. 3 Statistical source data. Experiment 2. Source Data Fig. 4 Statistical source data. Experiments 1a and 1b and 2. Source Data Fig. 5 Statistical source data. Experiment 3. Source Data Table 1 Statistical source data. Experiment 1a demographics, experiment 1b demographics, experiment 2 demographics and experiment 3 demographics.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Li, J., Zhong, Bl., Zhou, D. et al. The dynamic process of hyperfocusing and hyperfiltering in schizophrenia. Nat. Mental Health 2, 367–378 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00211-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00211-7