Okruszek Łukasz, Haman Maciej, Kalinowski Kasper, Talarowska Monika, Becchio Cristina, Manera Valeria
Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
Department of Adult Psychiatry, Medical University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland.
PLoS One. 2015 Feb 9;10(2):e0116793. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116793. eCollection 2015.
Patients with schizophrenia are deficient in multiple aspects of social cognition, including biological motion perception. In the present study we investigated the ability to read social information from point-light stimuli in schizophrenia.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants with paranoid schizophrenia and healthy controls were presented with a biological motion task depicting point-light actions of two agents either engaged in a communicative interaction, or acting independently of each other. For each stimulus, participants were asked to decide whether the two agents were communicating vs. acting independently of each other (task A), and to select the correct action description among five response alternatives (task B). Participants were also presented with a mental rotation task to assess their visuospatial abilities, and with a facial emotion recognition task tapping social cognition. Results revealed that participants with schizophrenia performed overall worse than controls both in discriminating communicative from non-communicative actions (task A) and in selecting which of the 5 response alternatives best described the observed actions (task B). Interestingly, the impaired performance of schizophrenic participants was mainly due to misclassification of non-communicative stimuli as communicative actions. Correlation analysis revealed that visuospatial abilities predicted performance in task A but not in task B, while facial emotion recognition abilities was correlated with performance in both task A and task B.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These findings are consistent with theories of "overmentalizing" (excessive attribution of intentionality) in schizophrenia, and suggest that processing social information from biological motion does rely on social cognition abilities.
精神分裂症患者在社会认知的多个方面存在缺陷，包括对生物运动的感知。在本研究中，我们调查了精神分裂症患者从点光刺激中读取社会信息的能力。
方法/主要发现：向偏执型精神分裂症患者和健康对照者呈现一项生物运动任务，该任务描绘了两个主体的点光动作，这两个主体要么进行交流互动，要么彼此独立行动。对于每个刺激，要求参与者判断两个主体是在交流还是彼此独立行动（任务A），并从五个反应选项中选择正确的动作描述（任务B）。还向参与者呈现了一项心理旋转任务以评估他们的视觉空间能力，以及一项面部表情识别任务以考察社会认知。结果显示，精神分裂症患者在区分交流动作和非交流动作（任务A）以及选择五个反应选项中哪个最能描述观察到的动作（任务B）方面总体表现比对照组差。有趣的是，精神分裂症患者的表现受损主要是由于将非交流刺激错误分类为交流动作。相关分析显示，视觉空间能力预测了任务A的表现，但不能预测任务B的表现，而面部表情识别能力与任务A和任务B的表现均相关。
结论/意义：这些发现与精神分裂症中“过度心理化”（过度归因于意向性）的理论一致，并表明从生物运动中处理社会信息确实依赖于社会认知能力。
