Visual processing and neuropsychological function in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.

Persons with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder exhibit deficits in both visual processing and neuropsychological tasks. Little is known, however, about whether these deficits are related to one another. We administered psychophysical tests of visual discrimination and recognition, and neuropsychological tests of abstract flexibility, verbal learning, visual memory, working memory and attention to 42 outpatients with stable but chronic schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Multiple regression analyses were performed to determine the relationship between these measures of neuropsychological function and visual psychophysical performance. Results indicated that motion perception was associated with working memory, and that the addition of a memory component to motion perception (motion recognition) was associated with both working memory and visual memory. Visual performance was not associated with symptom severity as measured by the PANSS. These results suggest that psychophysical tests of visual processing may contribute to deficits on neuropsychological tests of visual cognition, and may also reflect cross-modal disturbances of working memory function.