Analyses of learning in simple and dual tasks. A comparative study between patients diagnosed of schizophrenia and people without psychiatric diagnosis

Abstract

The present study tries to analyze the existing differences in the performance between people diagnosed of schizophrenia and people without any psychiatric diagnosis when performing several attentional tasks both at the same time and in separate moments. A sample of twenty people diagnosed of schizophrenia and twenty-eight students performed a cancellation task and a dichotic listening task both jointly and separately. The results show that the students performed always better than the schizophrenic patients, that the learning effect became more evident in the visual tasks than in the auditory ones, and that the performance of the second time the tasks were done depends greatly on the demand of attentional resources and the sensorial modality.