Low Latent Inhibition as a Personality Trait: Relationships With Autistic Traits, Schizotypy, and Openness

Low Latent Inhibition as a Personality Trait: Relationships With Autistic Traits, Schizotypy, and Openness

Low latent inhibition is a cognitive phenotype which has been demonstrated as being associated with openness and schizotypy, conferring cognitive benefits or mental disorder depending on factors such as intelligence (Peterson & Carson 2000)(Peterson et al. 2002)(Carson et al. 2003)(Gray et al. 2002)(Shrira & Tsakanikos 2009). High latent inhibition has also been shown to characterize autism, which like low latent inhibition can provide cognitive benefits but in opposite ways (Andersen 2022). Latent inhibition relates to how much information is filtered out from being processed based on its deemed relevance, where high latent inhibition promotes a focused cognitive style that ignores sensory and mental information relevant to the task, whereas low latent inhibition promotes an associative and distractible style where much more information is processed that is deemed not as relevant (Andersen 2022). Currently, latent inhibition has not been well characterized as a personality trait, nor have personality measures been created to measure latent inhibition as a personality trait. In this study, I create a body of items intended to measure low latent inhibition, and explore its structure and relationships with autism, schizotypy, and openness.

The study was conducted in an online survey with a sample size of 97, using PsyToolkit (Stoet 2010, 2017). The Unusual Experiences, Cognitive Disorganization, and Impulsive-Nonconformity scales of the short O-LIFE (Mason et al. 2005) were used to measure schizotypy. Autistic traits were measured with the extended 20-item AQ-10 from Cloudfindings (2021). Openness was measured with the openness scale from the big five inventory (John et al. 1991). 

The repetitive and social dimensions of autistic traits were extracted through factor analysis as in Cloudfindings (2021) and replicated [Table 1]. These oblimin rotated factor scores were used in the analyses. 

Table 1

	Details	Social
I often notice small sounds when others do not	0.6333	-0.1027
{reverse} I usually concentrate more on the whole picture, rather than the small details	-0.18	0.2163
{reverse} I find it easy to do more than one thing at once	0.0522	0.2091
{reverse} If there is an interruption, I can switch back to what I was doing very quickly	0.2551	0.374
{reverse} I find it easy to ‘read between the lines’ when someone is talking to me	-0.1219	0.8414
{reverse} I know how to tell if someone listening to me is getting bored	-0.1385	0.7626
When I’m reading a story I find it difficult to work out the characters’ intentions	0.1202	0.3903
I like to collect information about categories of things (e.g. types of car, types of bird, types of train, types of plant etc)	0.5047	0.0777
{reverse} I find it easy to work out what someone is thinking or feeling just by looking at their face	-0.1651	0.7347
I find it difficult to work out people’s intentions	0.1846	0.4981
I stick to the technical meaning of words rather than what other people think they mean.	0.1094	0.2079
Unless otherwise specified, I assume that people mean exactly what they say.	0.2844	0.4375
I enjoy looking through catalogues of products to see the details of each product and how it compares to others.	0.6504	0.0504
When I learn about a new category I like to go into detail to understand the small differences between different members of that category.	0.5675	0.0497
If I look at a pile of blue sweaters in a shop that are meant to be identical, I would be able to see differences between them.	0.7062	-0.0111
I would be the first to hear if there was a fly in the room	0.6228	-0.2361
I rock backwards and forwards, or side to side, either when sitting or when standing	0.5426	0.0506
I make repetitive hand and/or finger movements	0.5561	0.0481
I insist that aspects of daily routine must remain the same	0.4479	0.227
I have a special object(s) I like to carry around	0.3815	0.217

The social difficulty and autism-schizotypy dimensions were extracted from the scales using principal components analysis as in previous studies [Table 2].

Table 2

	Social Difficulty	Autism-Schizotypy
Unusual experiences	0.8143	-0.3159
Cognitive disorganization	0.819	0.2028
Impulsive non-conformity	0.6371	-0.3628
Repetitive	0.7837	0.1182
Social	0.2518	0.9122

The items for latent inhibition were then analyzed with principal components analysis [Table 3]. The scree plot suggested two factors, which were not rotated with oblimin rotation. The first had most items loading on it with the strongest loading items appearing to reflect cognitive difficulties, the second appeared to have most items reflecting associative and insightful thinking.

[Table 3]

	LLI Disorganization	LLI Enhanced Awareness
I can often become overwhelmed by information	0.75	-0.20
I have trouble controlling my thoughts	0.73	-0.12
Even if I’ve known something for a long time, I can’t help but wonder if I'm wrong when it comes up	0.70	-0.09
My thoughts jump around in almost random directions	0.67	-0.06
People are often too vague in the way they word things	0.66	-0.12
I miss verbal instructions because I am thinking about other things.	0.64	0.18
It's hard for me to make decisions, even the smallest ones	0.61	-0.13
I find it hard to keep consistent beliefs over time	0.60	-0.20
My thoughts often go off in tangents	0.59	0.07
I have trouble eliminating any possibilities, even unreasonable or unlikely ones.	0.57	0.04
I often have to ask people to clarify exactly what they mean because what they say could mean multiple things	0.51	0.09
When I talk, more words than I need to say something come in to my head	0.50	0.23
I can never seem to get “used to” anything	0.48	0.10
Sometimes I suddenly feel distracted by distant sounds that I am normally not aware of	0.46	0.21
When I am asked a question I’ve answered many times before, even something like my name, I have to think about it before I answer.	0.46	0.23
I often mix up my words when speaking	0.45	0.17
In my mind I constantly ask myself questions trying to understand everything.	0.42	0.34
I can never be sure about what side I'm on	0.39	0.06
I sometimes find that trivial things suddenly seem especially important or significant to me.	0.38	0.32
I sometimes become interested in people, events, places, or ideas that normally would not make an impression on me.	0.36	0.34
I frequently find that my thoughts are racing.	0.36	0.23
Bits of information which seem meaningless to others often seem meaningful to me.	0.35	0.49
I always had trouble paying attention in school	0.35	0.27
I can’t shut off my internal monologue	0.33	0.14
I need to find the root cause of everything	0.33	0.37
No idea, no matter how seemingly ridiculous is off limits for my consideration	0.31	0.19
I always need to figure everything out	0.30	0.40
I’m good at noticing underlying patterns in information	-0.13	0.75
I constantly find connections between things that seem unrelated on the surface.	0.07	0.74
I am good at predicting others actions	-0.35	0.71
I am good at predicting what someone is about to say	-0.31	0.70
I can tell when somebody is lying about something	-0.25	0.67
I notice patterns that others don’t	0.09	0.62
I always notice odd similarities between different events that happen in my life.	0.13	0.57
I am pretty good at predicting the future	-0.33	0.56
I find myself constantly coming up with theories to explain everything	0.21	0.52
I sometimes feel like I am on the verge of figuring out something really big or important.	0.12	0.51
I often notice things that I haven’t noticed before that take on a special significance.	0.27	0.48
I often feel the need to make sense of seemingly random situations or occurrences	0.28	0.47
I often come up with alternative solutions to problems	0.11	0.44
Different concepts seem to blend together in my mind	0.24	0.42
I need to connect everything I learn to a bigger idea	0.26	0.42
Sometimes ideas and insights come to me so fast that I cannot express them all.	0.23	0.42
When I learn new bits of information I re evaluate all that I currently know about a subject.	0.29	0.40
I tend to understand things on an abstract or intuitive way, that makes it hard to teach to others or explain	0.19	0.38
I can easily pick up on slight changes in others behavior or mood	0.05	0.35
My sense of smell sometimes becomes unusually strong	0.20	0.32
I have trouble focusing on the specifics I’m always thinking about the bigger picture	0.21	0.31
I feel similar to everybody in some way.	0.06	0.18
I can learn a lot of information rapidly if I am interested in the subject	0.24	0.02

The disorganized factor was associated with autistic and schizotypal traits, and weakly with openness. It was strongly associated with the social difficulty factor, and moderately associated with the autism-schizotypy continuum toward the autism side. The enhanced awareness factor was associated strongly with openness, schizotypy, and positive autistic traits, moderately with social difficulty, negatively with social autistic traits, and only weakly with cognitive disorganization compared to other schizotypy factors. [Table 4]

Table 4

	Disorg	Enhance	Soc. Dif	A-S	Open	UE	CD	IMP	Details	Social
LLI-Enhanced Awareness	0.34
Social Difficulty	0.76	0.57
Autism (vs schizotypy)	0.39	-0.33	0.10
Openness	0.22	0.54	0.41	-0.26
Unusual experiences	0.53	0.60	0.86	-0.07	0.36
Cognitive disorganization	0.81	0.21	0.77	0.43	0.16	0.51
Impulsive nonconformity	0.43	0.34	0.69	-0.16	0.40	0.45	0.42
Repetitive	0.65	0.51	0.75	0.34	0.29	0.59	0.51	0.25
Social	0.29	-0.37	0.08	0.95	-0.25	-0.05	0.30	-0.02	0.21
Openness	0.22	0.54	0.41	-0.26	1.00	0.36	0.16	0.40	0.29	-0.25

Principal component analysis was then applied to the schizotypy and autism factors, openness, and the LLI factors [Table 5]. All variables except social deficits loaded highly on the first component. The second component had inverse loadings for the lli-disorganized and lli-enhanced awareness factors, with social deficits loading strongly toward the disorganized direction, openness toward the enhanced direction, unusual experiences & impulsive nonconformity loading very weakly toward the enhanced direction, repetitive behavior loading weakly toward the disorganized dimension, and cognitive disorganization loading moderately in the disorganized direction. 

Table 5

	PC1	PC2
Unusual experiences	-0.81	0.13
Cognitive disorganization	-0.75	-0.45
Impulsive non-conformity	-0.63	0.11
Repetitive	-0.78	-0.16
Social	-0.07	-0.85
Openness	-0.53	0.54
LLI-Disorganization	-0.82	-0.39
LLI-Enhanced Awareness	-0.68	0.56

Discussion

Based on these results, it appears that the LLI scale measured two dimensions: one corresponding to cognitive deficits stemming from either high or low LLI, and the second relating to a more clear dimension of low vs high LLI. The disorganization factor correlated highly with social difficulty, and weakly with openness, and most strongly with cognitive disorganization, indicating that this factor represents a dimension of cognitive difficulties shared with schizotypy and autism. The enhanced awareness factor was characterized by items reflecting enhanced associative thinking, more attention to weakly relevant or related information, an explorative and intuitive cognitive style, and high level pattern recognition, which correlated highly with openness, positive schizotypy, and negatively with social deficits, in line with previous literature on how latent inhibition is related to openness, schizotypy, autism, and social cognition (Andersen 2022)(Peterson & Carson 2000)(Carson et al. 2003). The disorganization factor reflected cognitive distractibility, difficulties processing information, difficulties with social cognition, and thought disorder, which overlap with both schizotypy and autism, and resemble their overlap shown in factor analytic studies of autism and schizotypy with the social difficulty factor. 

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