Latent Inhibition and Openness to Experience in a high-achieving student population

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Abstract

Latent Inhibition (LI) is an attentional phenomenon in which repeated pre-exposure to a stimulus that is not reinforced retards future associability to that stimulus. LI adaptively allows the individual to categorize stimuli as relevant or irrelevant to goal attainment at a level below that of conscious awareness. Previous research has linked reduced LI with psychopathological conditions, such as acute schizophrenia and elevated scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Psychoticism Scale. We tested the hypothesis that reduced LI would be related to Openness to Experience, a dimension of Costa and McCrae’s Five Factor Model of Personality, due to the association of Openness with flexible cognitive categorization. Results supported this hypothesis: the correlation between LI and Openness among high-achieving individuals was substantial and highly significant (r=−0.44, P=0.0001) even when other relevant aspects of personality were held steady. Reduced LI may impart cognitive advantages in certain personality configurations.

Introduction

When individuals are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus without consequence or reinforcement, they learn future associations to that stimulus more slowly. This phenomenon, known as latent inhibition (LI), has been extensively studied and appears robust across a variety of mammalian species, including mice, rabbits, cats, and humans (Lubow & Gewirtz, 1995). There are several explanations for the latent inhibition effect (Schmajuk, Lam & Gray, 1996). Weiner, Shadach, Tarrach and Kidron (1996) suggested that repeated pre-exposure to a non-reinforced stimulus allows the individual to process that stimulus at a preconscious level and to categorize it as currently irrelevant so that it may be consciously ignored. Pre-exposure without reinforcement reduces the novelty of the stimulus and its associated capacity to attract attention (Gray & McNaughton, 1996). This ability to ignore a non-reinforced stimulus is a biologically adaptive function of implicit attention (Lubow & Gewirtz, 1995) which allows an individual to ‘gate’, or keep out of conscious awareness stimuli irrelevant to survival or to present goal attainment.

Reduced latent inhibition is associated with increased dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic system. Injections of the dopaminergic agonist d-amphetamine, which produce psychosis-like symptoms in humans, attenuate or abolish latent inhibition in both animals and humans (Gray, Pickering, Hemsley, Dawling & Gray, 1992). Standard neuroleptics, which reduce limbic dopamine levels and alleviate psychotic symptoms, produce increased latent inhibition (Peters and Joseph, 1993, Gray et al., 1992). In fact, this effect is so robust that researchers now use the LI animal paradigm to test the efficacy of new atypical antipsychotics such as clozapine (Moran, Fischer, Hitchcock & Moser, 1996) and olanzapine (Gosselin, Oberling & DiScala, 1996). Animal research has revealed that the nucleus accumbens, a portion of the ventral striatum, is the probable site of the dopamine release modulating LI (Gray et al., 1995).

Individual differences in LI among humans have been examined primarily in the context of mental disorder, such as the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia (Baruch et al., 1988b, Gray et al., 1992; but also see Swerdlow, Braff, Hartston, Perry & Geyer, 1996) or the presence of relatively problematical personality traits. Baruch et al., 1988a, Lubow et al., 1992 both described a trend towards reduced latent inhibition in normal subjects who obtained comparatively high scores on the Eysenck Psychoticism Scale (Eysenck, Eysenck & Barrett, 1985). These studies suggest that differences in LI may be associated with normal, non-psychopathological variability in personality. The present study further investigated this premise by examining the relationship of latent inhibition and Openness to Experience—a dimension of Costa and McCrae’s (1992) five factor personality model.

Openness is a high-order trait, associated with personality attributes such as imagination, creativity, intellectual curiosity, unconventional attitudes, and divergent thinking (McCrae, 1994). It is related to the ‘permeability of consciousness’ (McCrae & John, 1992) and a softening of the rigidity of mental categories (McCrae, 1994). If LI is a measure of the tendency to categorize stimuli at an implicit level of functioning, then LI and Openness might well be inversely related. We determined to investigate this possibility in a sample of high-achieving and productive individuals, controlling for variance in IQ [associated with Openness at approximately r=0.30 (McCrae & Costa, 1985)], and additionally analyzing the influence of other traits, including Psychoticism.

Section snippets

Participants

Ninety-one Harvard University students, ranging in age from 16 to 35 (mean=20.69, SD=3.22) participated in this study. Approximately two-thirds (n=58) were randomly assigned to the pre-exposed (experimental) LI condition, and one-third (n=33) were randomly assigned to the non-pre-exposed (control) LI condition.

Latent inhibition task

Subjects in the pre-exposed condition were shown a two-part video version of the auditory latent inhibition task, constructed after Lubow et al. (1992): in part one, the pre-exposure

Personality and IQ testing

Mean scores on all tested personality variables were within one standard deviation of the norm for the general population of 16–20 year-olds, with the exception of Openness to Experience, on which the Harvard students scored 1.12 standard deviations above normal (see Table 1). IQ scores (mean=131, SD=10.62) were approximately 2 standard deviations above the population mean of 100 (population SD=15; Wechsler, 1981).

Latent inhibition

Comparison of number of trials to rule identification for the pre-exposed

Discussion

The data from this experiment indicate that healthy, highly intelligent subjects differing in trait Openness may also be characterized by differences in what appears to be a more fundamental cognitive/neurophysiological response to ‘previously encountered’ information. The size and significance of the relationship demonstrated between attenuated latent inhibition and Openness is substantial enough to provide justification for research into the direct links between Openness and potential

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Melanie Glickson for her invaluable research assistance in this study and Richard McNally for his helpful comments on the manuscript. This research was supported by grants from the Harvard University Department of Psychology.

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