The LI effect is extremely robust, appearing in both invertebrate (for example, honey bees[3]) and mammalian species that have been tested and across many different learning paradigms, thereby suggesting some adaptive advantages, such as protecting the organism from associating irrelevant stimuli with other, more important, events.
Consequently, working-memory is inundated with experimentally familiar but phenomenally novel stimuli, each competing for the limited resources required for efficient information processing.
The assumption that the attentional process that produces LI in normal subjects is dysfunctional in people with schizophrenia has stimulated considerable research, with humans, as well as with rats and mice.
However, LI procedures may be useful in counteracting some of the undesirable side-effects that frequently accompany radiation and chemo-therapies for cancer, for example food aversion.
[9] In summary, the basic LI phenomenon represents some output of a selective attention process that results in learning to ignore irrelevant stimuli.
It has become an important tool for understanding information processing in general, as well as attentional dysfunctions in schizophrenia, and it has implications for a variety of practical problems.
Low latent inhibition seems to often correlate with distracted behaviors, and may resemble hyper-activity, hypomania, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in early decades of life.
More generally: those of above average intelligence are thought to be capable of processing this stream effectively, enabling their creativity and increasing their awareness of their surroundings.
[14] High levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine (or its agonists) in the ventral tegmental area of the brain have been shown to decrease latent inhibition.