Division of Schizophrenia Research, University Behavioral HealthCare, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, 151 CentennialAvenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA.
Schizophr Bull. 2011 Jul;37(4):681-9. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbr053.
This theme section on vision science and schizophrenia research demonstrates that our understanding of the disorder could be significantly accelerated by a greater adoption of the methods of vision science. In this introduction, we briefly describe what vision science is, how it has advanced our understanding of schizophrenia, and what challenges and opportunities lay ahead regarding schizophrenia research. We then summarize the articles that follow. These include reviews of abnormal form perception (perceptual organization and backward masking) and motion processing, and an article on reduced size contrast illusions experienced by hearing but not deaf persons with schizophrenia. These articles reveal that the methods of basic vision research can provide insights into a number of aspects of the disorder, including pathophysiology, development, cognition, social cognition, and phenomenology. Importantly, studies of visual processing in schizophrenia make it clear that there are impairments in the functioning of basic neural mechanisms (e.g., center-surround modulation, contextual modulation of feedforward processing, reentrant processing) that are found throughout the cortex and that are operative in multiple forms of cognitive dysfunction in the illness. Such evidence allows for an updated view of schizophrenia as a condition involving generalized failures in neural network formation and maintenance, as opposed to a primary failure in a higher level factor (e.g., cognitive control) that accounts for all other types of perceptual and cognitive dysfunction. Finally, studies of vision in schizophrenia can identify sensitive probes of neural functioning that can be used as biomarkers of treatment response.
本主题部分介绍了视觉科学和精神分裂症研究，展示了如果更多地采用视觉科学方法，我们对该疾病的理解可能会大大加快。在引言中，我们简要描述了什么是视觉科学、它如何促进我们对精神分裂症的理解，以及精神分裂症研究面临的挑战和机遇。然后我们总结了以下文章。这些文章包括对异常形态感知（感知组织和后向掩蔽）和运动处理的综述，以及一篇关于精神分裂症患者听力正常但听力丧失者经历的减小对比度错觉的文章。这些文章表明，基础视觉研究方法可以为该疾病的多个方面提供深入的了解，包括病理生理学、发展、认知、社会认知和现象学。重要的是，精神分裂症视觉处理的研究清楚地表明，基本神经机制（例如，中心-周围调制、前馈处理的上下文调制、折返处理）的功能受损，这些机制在整个皮层中都存在，并且在疾病的多种形式的认知功能障碍中都起作用。这种证据使我们对精神分裂症的看法得到更新，认为它是一种涉及神经网络形成和维持普遍失败的疾病，而不是一种更高级因素（例如认知控制）的主要失败，这种因素可以解释所有其他类型的感知和认知功能障碍。最后，精神分裂症的视觉研究可以确定神经功能的敏感探针，可作为治疗反应的生物标志物。
