P-1290 - Selective Attention in Delusion - Prone Individuals

Abstract

Introduction

Similarly to patients with overt delusions, individuals with subclinical forms of delusions should reveal high ability to select information relevant to their unusual believes and to ignore the ones which undermine their convictions. However, many researches indicate that delusion - prone individuals reveal the reasoning bias making decisions on the basis of too little evidence even if additional information is easily available.

Objective

The aim of the current study was to investigate the ability of delusion - prone individuals to select the relevant information among the irrelevant distractors in order to examine whether the susceptibility to delusions is related to either making information selection ability excessive or to impulsiveness which is the cause of hasty decision making.

Methods

The participants, 89 undergraduate students, completed the Peters’ Delusions Inventory. According their score on PDI they were divided into two groups: individuals with high and low susceptibility to delusions. All participants completed the Moroń Clock Test which measures the ability to attend selectively to the relevant stimuli among irrelevant distractors.

Results

In the current study the delusion - prone individuals did not reveal the excessive information selection ability, although they made more ‘false - alarms’ mistakes reacting to irrelevant stimuli rather than omitting the relevant ones.

Conclusions

The reaction pattern obtained in the task indicates that delusion - prone individuals are not characterized by excessive ability to select information, although they are more impulsive than individuals who scored low on PDI.