Alertness can be improved by an interaction between orienting attention and alerting attention in schizophrenia.

Background: Attention is impaired in schizophrenia. Early attention components include orienting and alerting, as well as executive control networks. Previous studies have shown mainly executive control deficits, while few of them found orienting and alerting abnormalities.

Attention and visual orienting in siblings, schizophrenic patients, and controls: impairment in attentional disengagement.

Visual orienting tasks reveal an impaired disengagement of attention in schizophrenia. We explored visual orientation in 20 schizophrenia patients (SZ), 20 full siblings (FS), and 20 controls (C) using a cued target detection (gap vs. no gap) and a choice reaction time task.