An attentional assessment of foster children at risk for schizophrenia.

Investigated whether processes observed in adult schizophrenics could be detected in children who were not schizophrenic but were at heightened risk for the disorder. A battery of 8 attention-demanding tasks was administered to (a) 9 foster children at heightened risk for schizophrenia by virtue of having a schizophrenic biological mother, (b) 10 foster children without a family history of psychiatric disorder, and (c) 10 children living with their biological parents, none of whom had a history of psychiatric disorder. The tasks included in the battery had been demonstrated in previous research to be sensitive discriminators of adult schizophrenic pathology. Results indicate the presence of attentional dysfunction in high-risk children prior to the onset of clinical symptoms. The high-risk group showed significantly lower levels of performance on certain tasks, notably the complex versions of the span-of-apprehension and Spokes tests from the Halstead-Reitan Test Battery, and the simple conditions of the concept attainment task. Examination of low-scoring Ss, intercorrelations between tasks, and the results of a cluster analysis revealed that within the high-risk group there was a subset of Ss who showed impairment across these tasks to produce the overall low group means. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)