Susceptibility to distraction during analogical reasoning in schizophrenia

Proportional analogies between four objects (e.g., a squirrel is to tree as a golden fish is to? aquarium) were examined in 30 schizophrenia patients and 30 healthy controls. Half of the problems included distracting response options: remote semantic associates (fishing rod) and perceptually similar salient distractors (shark). Although both patients and controls performed fairly accurately on the no-distraction analogies, patients’ performance in the presence of distractors was distorted, suggesting deficits in attention and cognitive control affecting complex cognition. Finally, although education, fluid intelligence, and interference resolution strongly predicted distractibility in the control group, in the schizophrenia group susceptibility to distraction was unrelated to these markers of general cognitive ability, implying an idiosyncratic nature of reasoning distortions in schizophrenia. •Schizophrenia patients show increased distractibility in analogical reasoning.•Their distractibility likely reflects deficits in attention and cognitive control.•These deficits affect complex cognition.•Unlike controls, patients yielded scores unrelated to general cognitive ability.•Data suggest disintegrated structure of cognitive abilities in schizophrenia.