What's in a face? Effects of stimulus duration and inversion on face processing in schizophrenia

SCHIZOPHRENIA RESEARCH

卷:103

Article; Proceedings Paper

Butler, Pamela D.^1,2,3  Tambini, Arielle⁴  Yovel, Galit⁴  Jalbrzikowski, Maria¹  Ziwich, Rachel¹  Silipo, Gail¹  Kanwisher, Nancy⁴  Javitt, Daniel C.^1,2,3 

[1] Nathan S Kline Inst Psychiat Res, Cognit Neurosci & Schizophrenia Program, Orangeburg, NY 10962 USA

[2] NYU, Sch Med, Dept Psychiat, New York, NY 10016 USA

[3] CUNY City Coll, New York, NY 10031 USA

[4] MIT, Dept Brain & Cognit Sci, McGovern Inst Brain Res, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

关键词: schizophrenia;    face inversion effect;    visual;    magnocellular;    fusiform face area;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.schres.2008.03.007

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

A number of studies show deficits in early-stage visual processing in schizophrenia. Deficits are also seen at more complex levels, such as ability to discriminate faces. This study investigated the face inversion effect, which reflects intrinsic cortical processing within the ventral visual stream, as well as contrast sensitivity, which reflects low-level visual processing, in order to evaluate integrity of specific stages of face processing in schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia and controls discriminated between pairs of upright or inverted faces or houses that had been manipulated to differ in the shape of the parts or the spatial distance among palls. The duration threshold for above chance performance on upright stimuli was obtained for patients using a house discrimination task. Contrast sensitivity was assessed for gratings of three spatial frequencies ranging from 0.5 to 21 cycles/degree. Patients needed significantly longer time to obtain 70% correct for upright stimuli and showed decreased contrast sensitivity. Increased duration threshold correlated with reduced contrast sensitivity to low (magnocellular-biased) but not medium or high spatial frequency stimuli. Using increased durations, patients showed significant inversion effects that were equivalent to those of controls oil the face part and spacing tasks. Like controls, patients did not show inversion effects on the house tasks. These findings show that patients have difficulty integrating visual information as shown by increased duration thresholds. However, when faces were presented at these longer duration thresholds, patients showed the same relative processing ability for upright vs. inverted faces as controls, suggesting preserved intrinsic processing within cortical face processing regions. Similar inversion effects for face part and spacing for both groups suggest that they are using the same holistic face processing mechanism. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

Free