Sustained attention deficits in relation to psychometrically identified schizotypy: Evaluating a potential endophenotypic marker Diane C. Gooding a,b, * , Christie W. Matts a , Elizabeth A. Rollmann a,c a University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Psychology, United States b University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Psychiatry, United States c Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota, United States Received 28 September 2005; received in revised form 21 November 2005; accepted 23 November 2005 Abstract Sustained attention deficits have been posited as a potential endophenotypic marker of vulnerability to schizophrenia. Prior studies have indicated that schizophrenia patients, their first-degree relatives, and psychosis-prone individuals, identified on the basis of measures of positive schizotypy, have demonstrated sustained attention deficits. To date, there have been no published reports of sustained attention deficits in individuals with negative schizotypy, as measured by the revised Social Anhedonia Scale. In this study, we examined sustained attention, measured with the CPT-Identical Pairs version, in 160 individuals with elevated scores on the Chapman Perceptual Aberration and/or Magical Ideation Scales, 96 individuals with elevated scales on the Social Anhedonia Scale, and 137 controls. Both psychosis-prone groups performed more poorly than the controls in terms of discrimination ability, as measured by d V, though the groups did not differ in terms of either their reaction time or overall response criterion (lnb). These results provide evidence that both positive and negative aspects of schizotypy are associated with sustained attention deficits, as measured by the Continuous Performance Test. The findings add to the converging evidence indicating that sustained attention deficits are a potential endophenotypic indicator of a schizophrenia diathesis. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Schizotypy; Attention; Endophenotype; Continuous performance test 1. Introduction Continuous performance tasks (CPTs) are one of the most frequently used measures of sustained attention in experimental psychopathology research. There are several variants of CPTs, all of which assess the ability to discriminate targets from nontargets. 0920-9964/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.schres.2005.11.015 * Corresponding author. Department of Psychology, 1202 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, United States. Tel.: +1 608 262 3918 (O); fax: +1 608 262 4029. E-mail address: dgooding@facstaff.wisc.edu (D.C. Gooding). Schizophrenia Research 82 (2006) 27 – 37 www.elsevier.com/locate/schres