The current study used a cued backward masking task to investigate 23 people with schizophrenia and 27 healthy controls. People with schizophrenia were hypothesized to perform better on invalidly cued trials when making a simple identification or location judgment. However, we found schizophrenia impaired performance on both valid and invalid cues to the same degree whether the cue was a stored representation (top-down) or presented at the location of the stimulus (bottom-up). In contrast to a large neuropsychological literature, these findings suggest that people with schizophrenia show no specific spatial attentional control deficit. The errors that they make on such task may be consistent with a generalized impairment.