Loughland Carmel M, Williams Leanne M, Gordon Evian
Brain Dynamics Centre, Westmead Hospital, and Department of Psychology, University of Sydney, Australia.
Biol Psychiatry. 2002 Aug 15;52(4):338-48. doi: 10.1016/s0006-3223(02)01356-2.
Abnormal visual scanpaths to faces and facial expressions in schizophrenia may underlie schizophrenic subjects' disturbed interpersonal communication. This study is the first to examine the specificity of these impairments to schizophrenia, by including an affective disorder psychiatric control group.
The visual scanpath performance of 65 schizophrenia, 52 affective disordered, and 61 control subjects were compared in two experiments. In the "face recognition" experiment, subjects viewed four identifiable (non-degraded) neutral faces versus four matched non-identifiable (degraded) control faces. In the "facial affect recognition" experiment, subjects viewed positive (happy), negative (sad), and neutral (control) facial emotion stimuli. Concurrent behavioral tasks were face matching (face recognition) and expression matching (facial affect recognition), each under two multiple-choice conditions (7 or 3 options).
Scanpath disturbances were most apparent in schizophrenia subjects, who maintained a comparatively "restricted" scanpath style to all face stimuli. Schizophrenics subjects also showed the greatest recognition difficulties, particularly for neutral and happy faces. Scanpath parameters for affective disorder subjects differed only from the schizophrenia (but not the control) group, except for attention to facial features where they generally avoided facial features in all expressions and showed the greatest attentional problems of all groups for degraded faces.
Our results suggest that a global restriction of visual scanpaths is specific to schizophrenic psychosis and might be a trait marker for this disorder, whereas scanpath abnormalities in affective disorder might instead reflect severe state-based (or discrete) attentional disturbances.
精神分裂症患者对面部及面部表情的视觉扫描路径异常可能是其人际沟通障碍的潜在原因。本研究首次纳入情感障碍精神病对照组，以检验这些损伤对精神分裂症的特异性。
在两个实验中比较了65名精神分裂症患者、52名情感障碍患者和61名对照者的视觉扫描路径表现。在“面部识别”实验中，受试者观看四张可识别（未降解）的中性面孔与四张匹配的不可识别（降解）的对照面孔。在“面部情感识别”实验中，受试者观看正面（快乐）、负面（悲伤）和中性（对照）面部情绪刺激。同时进行的行为任务是面部匹配（面部识别）和表情匹配（面部情感识别），每种任务都有两种多项选择条件（7选或3选）。
扫描路径障碍在精神分裂症患者中最为明显，他们对所有面部刺激保持相对“受限”的扫描路径方式。精神分裂症患者也表现出最大的识别困难，尤其是对中性和快乐面孔。情感障碍患者的扫描路径参数仅与精神分裂症组（而非对照组）不同，除了对面部特征的关注，他们在所有表情中通常都避免关注面部特征，并且在所有组中对降解面孔表现出最大的注意力问题。
我们的结果表明，视觉扫描路径的整体受限是精神分裂症性精神病所特有的，可能是该疾病的一个特质标记，而情感障碍中的扫描路径异常可能反而反映了严重的基于状态（或离散）的注意力障碍。
