From basic perception deficits to facial affect recognition impairments in schizophrenia

Abstract

While impaired facial emotion recognition and magnocellular deficits in visual perception are core features of schizophrenia, their relationship is still unclear. Our aim was to analyze the oscillatory background of these processes and to investigate the connection between the magnocellular pathway deficit and the abnormal facial affect processing. Thirty-nine subjects with schizophrenia and forty socially matched healthy controls subjects were enrolled. A 128 channel EEG was recorded in three experimental tasks: first, participants viewed magnocellular biased low-spatial frequency (LSF) and parvocellular biased high-spatial frequency (HSF) Gabor-patches, then faces and houses were presented and in the third task a facial affect recognition task was presented with happy, sad and neutral faces. Event-related theta (4–7 Hz) synchronization (ERS) (i.e. an increase in theta power) by magnocellular biased stimuli was decreased in patients relative to controls, while no similar differences were found between groups in the parvocellular biased condition. ERS was significantly lower in patients compared to healthy controls both in the face and in the emotion recognition task. Theta ERS to magnocellular biased stimuli, but not to parvocellular biased stimuli, were correlated with emotion recognition performance. These findings indicate a bottom up disruption of face perception and emotion recognition in schizophrenia.

Changes in visual size perception in Schizophrenia and Depression

“…A great variety of studies show changes in the visual processing of patients with schizophrenia and depression. Among those are altered perceptual organization (Steven et al, 2020;Panton, Badcock, & Badcock, 2016;Silverstein & Keane, 2011), face perception and recognition (Frassle et al, 2020;Marosi, Fodor, & Csukly, 2019;Stroud et al, 2018;Chen & Ekstrom, 2017;Berg et al, 2016;Maher, Ekstrom, Holt, Ongur, & Chen, 2016;McBain, Norton, & Chen, 2010;Silverstein et al, 2014;Vakhrusheva, et al, 2014), Psicol. Pesqui.…”

Disease-specific contribution of pulvinar dysfunction to impaired emotion recognition in schizophrenia

“…In Sz, differential deficits in magnocellular processing have been reported and related to potentially impaired patterns of sensory gain and functions of the N-methyl-D-aspartate-type glutamate receptors (NMDAR) (reviewed in 13 ). Moreover, impairments in magnocellular function correlate with behavioral measures of impaired FER in Sz, supporting the involvement of this pathway in social cognition 14-16 . By contrast, the ventral visual stream receives predominant input from the subcortical parvocellular system and is specialized for slower but higher-resolution processing of stimulus details.…”

The 4D Space-Time Dimensions of Facial Perception

“…Likewise, we can examine the decoding of more complicated emotional expressions, speech and language with 3D FACS over time (Lu et al, 2006;Jack et al, 2014). Finally, we may better understand the reasons why emotional expressions, inversion or movement, present challenges for specific clinical subpopulations during facial perception tasks, such as in Autism Spectrum Disorder (Weigelt et al, 2012;Anzalone et al, 2014) or Schizophrenia (Onitsuka et al, 2006;Wang et al, 2007;Marosi et al, 2019).…”