Assessing early processing of eye gaze in schizophrenia: measuring the cone of direct gaze and reflexive orienting of attention

Seymour, Kiley; Rhodes, Gillian; McGuire, Jonathan; Williams, Nikolas; Jeffery, Linda; Langdon, Robyn

doi:10.1080/13546805.2017.1285755

Cited by 17 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…In other words, the self-referential hyperresponsivity in patients is likely the result of effects manifesting at later stages of deliberative cognitive processing. This aligns with evidence that patients have also demonstrated faster response times when detecting targets that are congruently cued by gaze at longer SOAs-where there is time for deliberative self-referential processes to influence gaze evaluation (Langdon et al, 2017)-and the interpretation that the direct-gaze bias effect observed in patients (when averted gaze is mistakenly judged direct) likely reflects later stages of cognitive processing and selfreferential evaluation, and not fundamental impairments of visual perception (Franck et al,1998;Franck et al, 2002;Seymour et al, 2017).…”

Section: Srtssupporting

confidence: 80%

“…These findings suggest that the bias is likely driven by later, conscious processes, rather than the early low-level visual processes that support gaze perception. In line with this interpretation, studies that do not involve a self-referential judgement, and simply instruct participants to report whether the eyes are averted to the left or right, have been unable to reliably identify a direct-gaze bias in patients (Franck et al, 1998;Franck et al, 2002;Seymour, Rhodes, McGuire, Williams, & Langdon, 2017). Summing up these findings, the early perceptual processing of gaze appears to be intact in schizophrenia, while later processes associated with evaluating its social significance may be disrupted (see, e.g., Langdon et al, 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…To date, the only evidence of impaired automatic orienting to others' gaze in schizophrenia comes from studies using highly stylised or schematic "gaze" stimuli (e.g., Akiyama et al, 2008;Dalmaso, Galfano, Tarqui, Forti, & Castelli, 2013). Contrastingly, gaze-cueing studies that use biologically realistic stimuli (e.g., photographs) provide relatively consistent evidence of intact automatic orienting to both gaze (e.g., Magnee, Kahn, Cahn, & Kemner, 2011;Seymour et al, 2017) and head-orientation cues (Langdon, Corner, McLaren, Coltheart, & Ward, 2006) in schizophrenia.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Responding to joint attention bids in schizophrenia: An interactive eye-tracking study

Caruana

Seymour

Brock

et al. 2019

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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This study investigated social cognition in schizophrenia using a virtual reality paradigm to capture the dynamic processes of evaluating and responding to eye gaze as an intentional communicative cue. A total of 21 patients with schizophrenia and 21 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched healthy controls completed an interactive computer game with an on-screen avatar that participants believed was controlled by an off-screen partner. On social trials, participants were required to achieve joint attention by correctly interpreting and responding to gaze cues. Participants also completed non-social trials in which they responded to an arrow cue within the same task context. While patients and controls took equivalent time to process communicative intent from gaze shifts, patients made significantly more errors than controls when responding to the directional information conveyed by gaze, but not arrow, cues. Despite no differences in response times to gaze cues between groups, patients were significantly slower than controls when responding to arrow cues. This is the opposite pattern of results previously observed in autistic adults using the same task and suggests that, despite general impairments in attention orienting or oculomotor control, patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a facilitation effect when responding to communicative gaze cues. Findings indicate a hyper-responsivity to gaze cues of communicative intent in schizophrenia. The possible effects of self-referential biases when evaluating gaze direction are discussed, as are clinical implications.

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Section: Srtssupporting

confidence: 80%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Responding to joint attention bids in schizophrenia: An interactive eye-tracking study

Caruana

Seymour

Brock

et al. 2019

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…While the CoDG has been shown to be associated with a number of psychopathology traits [6,13,33], there have been inconsistencies in its interpretation. Some have interpreted a wider CoDG as indicative of stronger self-referential tendency [13,31,34], while others have attributed it to poorer precision [35]. Notably, Mareschal et al (2013) showed that while the CoDG width is unaffected by visual noise, the variance in the width is increased.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing eye contact perception: Measuring perceptual precision and self-referential tendency using an online psychophysical eye contact detection task

et al. 2020

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Eye contact perception-the ability to accurately and efficiently discriminate others' gaze directions-is critical to understanding others and functioning in a complex social world. Previous research shows that it is affected in multiple neuropsychiatric disorders accompanied by social dysfunction, and understanding the cognitive processes giving rise to eye contact perception would help advance mechanistic investigations of psychopathology. This study aims to validate an online, psychophysical eye contact detection task through which two constituent cognitive components of eye contact perception (perceptual precision and selfreferential tendency) can be derived. Data collected from a large online sample showed excellent test-retest reliability for self-referential tendency and moderate reliability for perceptual precision. Convergence validity was supported by correlations with social cognitive measures tapping into different aspects of understanding others. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that perceptual precision and self-referential tendency explained unique variance in social cognition, suggesting that they measure unique aspects of related constructs. Overall, this study provided support for the reliability and validity of the eye contact perception metrics derived using the online Eye Contact Detection Task. The value of the task for future psychopathology research was discussed.

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“…Although our sample sizes are small, as clinical practice moves toward individualized treatment plans, it is critical that biobehavioral measures are sensitive and reliable at an individual level . Further, small sample sizes have long been used when measuring eye‐movements in schizophrenia patients (for recent work see: Meyhofer et al, ; Seymour et al, ; Thakkar et al, ). We use eye‐movement measures in the present study to examine the effect of a drug treatment and demonstrate robust preliminary findings that significant differences can be observed using the antisaccade task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential benefits of olanzapine on executive function in schizophrenia patients: Preliminary findings

Mehta

Won

Babin

et al. 2019

Human Psychopharmacology

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Objective: Schizophrenia patients show executive function (EF) impairments in voluntary orienting as measured by eye-movements. We tested 14 inpatients to investigate the effects of the antipsychotic olanzapine on EF, as measured by antisaccade eye-movement performance.Methods: Patients were tested at baseline (before olanzapine), 3-5 days post-medication, and 12-14 days post-medication. Patients were also assessed on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) to measure the severity of schizophreniarelated symptoms, and administered the Stroop task, a test of EF. Nine matched controls were also tested on the antisaccade and Stroop.Results: Both groups showed improvement on Stroop and antisaccade; however, the schizophrenia group improved significantly more on antisaccade, indicating an additional benefit of olanzapine on EF performance. Patients with poorer baseline antisaccade performance (High-Deficit) showed significantly greater improvement on the antisaccade task than patients with better baseline performance (Low-Deficit), suggesting that baseline EF impairment predicts the magnitude of cognitive improvement with olanzapine. These subgroups showed significant and equivalent improvement on PANSS scores, indicating that improvement on the antisaccade task with olanzapine was not a result of differences in magnitude of clinical improvement.Conclusions: This preliminary study provides evidence that olanzapine may be most advantageous for patients with greater baseline EF deficits. K E Y W O R D Santipsychotics, antisaccade task, cognitive heterogeneity, executive function, eye-movements, Stroop task

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Assessing early processing of eye gaze in schizophrenia: measuring the cone of direct gaze and reflexive orienting of attention

Abstract: These results suggest that while patients may suffer deficits associated with interpreting another person's gaze, the earliest processes concerned with detecting averted gaze and reflexively orienting to the gazed-at location are intact.

Cited by 17 publications

References 61 publications

Responding to joint attention bids in schizophrenia: An interactive eye-tracking study

Responding to joint attention bids in schizophrenia: An interactive eye-tracking study

Deconstructing eye contact perception: Measuring perceptual precision and self-referential tendency using an online psychophysical eye contact detection task

Differential benefits of olanzapine on executive function in schizophrenia patients: Preliminary findings

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