Behavioral variability of process and reactive schizophrenics in a binary guessing task.

Process and reactive schizophrenics differ in run producing behavior when attempting to generate a random binary series of heads and tails. Reactive schizophrenics manifest more response variability than process schizophrenics. Evidence for this is a lower correlation for reactives between number of runs in the 1st and 2nd ? of a series of 300 binary responses. It is of interest to note that reactives are more variable than a normal undergraduate sample whereas process schizophrenics are not (see 34: 7320). The process group produced significantly more runs than the reactive group. This difference appears due to a greater tendency for process schizophrenics to produce runs of 1 (simple alternations), a form of response stereotypy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)