Effects of human and nonhuman stimuli on attention and learning in psychotic children

Abstract

Psychodynamically oriented theorists maintain that childhood psychosis is caused by traumatic mother-child relations which result in the child's withdrawal from human interactions. An alternative viewpoint holds that psychotic children suffer from neurological impairments resulting in sensory and cognitive deficits. The present exploratory study attempts to measure the effect of human stimuli on the performance of psychotic children in a visual fixation experiment and a simple discrimination learning task. Comparing small groups of psychotic, younger normal, and older normal children, the psychotics showed attentional deficits and learning difficulties, but they were not influenced by the social versus nonsocial nature of the stimuli. Moreover, the psychotic children showed noteworthy improvement under conditions of positive reward for correct performance. While acknowledging the limitations of this research, the need for empirical studies of psychotic children in diverse treatment settings is emphasized.