Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, Rutgers University, Graduate Program in Neuroscience Piscataway, NJ, USA ; Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care, Division of Schizophrenia Research Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Front Psychol. 2013 Aug 27;4:547. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00547. eCollection 2013.
Impairments in visual perceptual organization abilities are a repeatedly observed cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. These impairments have been found to be most prominent among patients with histories of poor premorbid social functioning, disorganized symptoms, and poor clinical outcomes. Despite the demonstration of significant sex differences for these clinical factors in schizophrenia, the extent of sex differences for visual perceptual organization in schizophrenia is unknown. Therefore, we investigated the extent to which previously known correlates (premorbid social sexual functioning and disorganized symptoms) and a novel factor (participant sex) accounted for performance on two perceptual organization tasks (contour integration and Ebbinghaus illusion) that have previously demonstrated sensitivity to schizophrenia. We also determined the relative degree to which each of these factors predicted task scores over and above the others. Schizophrenia patients (N = 109, 43 females) from different levels of care were ascertained. Female patients demonstrated higher contour integration scores, but lower performance on the context sensitivity index of the Ebbinghaus illusion, compared to males. Contour integration performance was significantly associated with poorer premorbid adolescent social sexual functioning and higher levels of disorganized symptoms, supporting past results that indicate a relationship among poor premorbid social sexual functioning, disorganized symptoms, and visual perceptual abnormalities in schizophrenia. However, analyses of Ebbinghaus illusion performance suggests there is a complex relationship among patient sex, clinical factors and perceptual abilities with relatively intact bottom-up grouping processes in females, but greater problems, compared to males with more top-down mediated context sensitivity. Therefore, sex differences may be an important consideration for future studies of visual perceptual organization in schizophrenia.
视知觉组织能力损伤是精神分裂症中反复观察到的认知缺陷。这些损伤在有不良病前社会功能、思维紊乱症状和不良临床结局史的患者中最为明显。尽管精神分裂症中这些临床因素存在显著的性别差异，但视知觉组织方面的性别差异程度尚不清楚。因此，我们研究了先前已知的相关性（病前社会性功能和思维紊乱症状）和一个新因素（参与者性别）在多大程度上可以解释两个视知觉组织任务（轮廓整合和艾宾浩斯错觉）的表现，这两个任务以前都证明对精神分裂症敏感。我们还确定了这些因素中每一个因素在其他因素之上对任务分数的预测程度。从不同护理水平确定了精神分裂症患者（N=109，43 名女性）。与男性相比，女性患者的轮廓整合分数较高，但艾宾浩斯错觉的上下文敏感度指数得分较低。轮廓整合表现与较差的病前青少年社会性功能和更高的思维紊乱症状显著相关，这支持了过去的研究结果，表明病前社会性功能差、思维紊乱症状和精神分裂症中的视知觉异常之间存在关系。然而，对艾宾浩斯错觉表现的分析表明，患者性别、临床因素和知觉能力之间存在复杂的关系，女性的自上而下的中介上下文敏感度相对完整，但与男性相比，存在更多的问题。因此，性别差异可能是未来精神分裂症视知觉组织研究的一个重要考虑因素。
