Distractibility in schizophrenia and organic cerebral disease.
Schizophrenic patients, along with temporal lobe epileptic and arteriosclerotic patients, proved to be more distractible in an auditory short-term memory test than normal and paranoid patient controls. This impairment of attention in the schizophrenic group was found to be specific to those patients with a more malignant symptomatology (the "hebephrenic" group). The results of an analogous test of visual distractibility were entirely negative.