Disordered Cognition and Stimulus Processing
JEFFREY L. HOUPT 1,
GARY J. TUCKER M.D.2, , and
MARTIN HARROW PH.D.3
1 Staff Psychiatrist, U.S. Naval Hospital, Oakland, Calif.
2 Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Residency Training, Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, N. H. 03755
3 Associate Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology) and Chief Psychologist, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Conn.
The perceptual style of processing stimuli (kinesthetic figural aftereffects) by 53 acute psychiatric inpatients was related to disorders in their perceptual experience of the environment and in their formal thought processes (overinclusive and idiosyncratic thinking). Psychiatric patients who reduced incoming stimuli also manifested greater abnormal perceptual experiences and thought disturbances. At the time of hospitalization the schizophrenics reduced incoming stimuli to a greater extent than did the nonschizophrenics and latent schizophrenics.
