This chapter reports a series of investigations of the relationships between the skin conductance orienting response (SCR OR) and measures of automatic and controlled information processing during basic information processing tasks that are of general interest to psychophysiologists. These have included a variety of orienting tasks and also classical conditioning. We have been particularly interested in studying the effect of manipulating attention to stimuli on the SCR OR and cognitive processing measures. We began by examining attentional processes and their psychophysiological correlates in normal college undergraduates, and then extended these studies to include a population of recent-onset schizophrenic patients, a population where fundamental mechanisms of attention and information processing are agreed to be abnormal.