Divided visual attention in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders

Although learning and physiological studies have suggested that criminal psychopaths are characterized by excessive selective attention, divided attention studies have demonstrated deficits suggesting inadequate breadth of attention but not reduced attention to explicit secondary contingencies. Divided attention studies also suggest poorer information-processing in psychopaths given left hemisphere activation regardless of selective attention. To provide more powerful tests of these hypotheses, 129 righthanded male inmates, assessed by Hareʹs Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) (Hare, 1985), completed a divided visual field task with two lateralized stimuli per trial under conditions promoting attention relatively focused on one of the tasks or equally divided between the two tasks. Under focusing conditions promoting left hemisphere activation, psychopaths misclassified more secondary task and marginally more primary task targets than nonpsychopaths. Psychopaths also overresponded to distractors on both tasks under focusing conditions, replicating reduced breadth of attention but not inattention to secondary targets. However, no performance deficits were evident under equally divided attention conditions. Regressions indicated that both empirically validated dimensions of psychopathy contributed to observed deficits. Reduced breadth of attention under focusing conditions and cognitive deficits given left hemisphere activation appear viable explanations of psychopathsʹ performance deficits.