Validating the construct of aberrant salience in schizophrenia — Behavioral evidence for an automatic process

Suspecting significance behind ordinary events is a common feature in psychosis and it is assumed to occur due to aberrant salience attribution. The Salience Attribution Test (SAT; Roiser et al., 2009) measures aberrant salience as a bias towards one out of two equally reinforced cue features as opposed to adaptive salience towards features indicating high reinforcement. This is the first study to validate the latent constructs involved in salience attribution in patients. Forty-nine schizophrenia patients and forty-four healthy individuals completed the SAT, a novel implicit salience paradigm (ISP), a reversal learning task and a neuropsychological test battery. First, groups were compared on raw measures. Second and within patients, these were correlated and then used for a principal component analysis (PCA). Third, sum scores matching the correlation and component pattern were correlated with psychopathology. Compared to healthy individuals, patients exhibited more implicit aberrant salience in the SAT and ISP and less implicit and explicit adaptive salience attribution in the SAT. Implicit aberrant salience from the SAT and ISP positively correlated with each other and negatively with reversal learning. Whereas explicit aberrant salience was associated with cognition, implicit and explicit adaptive salience were positively correlated. A similar pattern emerged in the PCA and implicit aberrant salience was associated with negative symptoms. Taken together, implicit aberrant salience from the SAT and ISP seems to reflect an automatic process that is independent from deficient salience ascription to relevant events. Its positive correlation with negative symptoms might reflect motivational deficits present in chronic schizophrenia patients.