Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Dept. of Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology, Universitätsstraße 150, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.
Psychiatry Res. 2012 Jan 30;195(1-2):9-17. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2011.07.017. Epub 2011 Jul 30.
Face and body perception rely on common processing mechanisms and activate similar but not identical brain networks. Patients with schizophrenia show impaired face perception, and the present study addressed for the first time body perception in this group. Seventeen patients diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder were compared to 17 healthy controls on standardized tests assessing basic face perception skills (identity discrimination, memory for faces, recognition of facial affect). A matching-to-sample task including emotional and neutral faces, bodies and cars either in an upright or in an inverted position was administered to assess potential category-specific performance deficits and impairments of configural processing. Relative to healthy controls, schizophrenia patients showed poorer performance on the tasks assessing face perception skills. In the matching-to-sample task, they also responded more slowly and less accurately than controls, regardless of the stimulus category. Accuracy analysis showed significant inversion effects for faces and bodies across groups, reflecting configural processing mechanisms; however reaction time analysis indicated evidence of reduced inversion effects regardless of category in schizophrenia patients. The magnitude of the inversion effects was not related to clinical symptoms. Overall, the data point towards reduced configural processing, not only for faces but also for bodies and cars in individuals with schizophrenia.
面部和身体感知依赖于共同的加工机制，并激活相似但不完全相同的大脑网络。精神分裂症患者表现出面部感知障碍，本研究首次在该群体中研究了身体感知。17 名被诊断为精神分裂症或分裂情感障碍的患者与 17 名健康对照者进行了比较，他们接受了评估基本面部感知技能的标准化测试（身份识别、面孔记忆、面部表情识别）。进行了一项匹配样本任务，包括情绪和中性面孔、身体和汽车，无论是直立还是倒置，以评估潜在的类别特异性表现缺陷和构形加工受损。与健康对照组相比，精神分裂症患者在评估面部感知技能的任务中表现较差。在匹配样本任务中，无论刺激类别如何，他们的反应速度和准确性都比对照组差。准确性分析显示，无论组别如何，面孔和身体都存在显著的反转效应，反映了构形加工机制；然而，反应时间分析表明，无论类别如何，精神分裂症患者的反转效应都有所降低。反转效应的幅度与临床症状无关。总体而言，数据表明精神分裂症患者的构形加工能力下降，不仅是面孔，还有身体和汽车。
