Psychopathy and the allocation of attentional capacity in a divided-attention situation.

Investigated the hypothesis that psychopaths allocate most of their attentional capacity to stimuli and responses of immediate interest by assessing psychopaths' dual-task performance under 2 instructional sets. Using R. D. Hare's (see record 1985-22847-001) psychopathology checklist, 72 White male prison inmates (approximate mean age 25 yrs) were classified as psychopaths or nonpsychopaths. It was hypothesized that psychopaths would divide attention adequately between a visual search and probe reaction time (RT) task, but that when instructions defined the search as Ss' primary task, psychopaths would overfocus on it and outperform nonpsychopaths at the cost of relatively poor secondary task performance. Results challenge the validity of the overfocusing hypothesis. S groups performed equally well on the search when it received instructional priority, but psychopaths made more search errors under divided-attention instructions. Psychopaths also responded more slowly than nonpsychopaths to auditory probes across conditions. Results suggest that psychopaths may incur relatively large capacity costs in attempting to shift their attentional resources between processing tasks. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)