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Integrated assessment of visual perception abnormalities in psychotic disorders and relationship with clinical characteristics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2018

Halide Bilge Türközer ,
Tuna Hasoğlu ,
Yue Chen ,
Lesley Anne Norris ,
Meredith Brown ,
Nathaniel Delaney-Busch ,
Emre H. Kale ,
Zahide Pamir ,
Hüseyin Boyacı  and
Gina Kuperberg
...Show all authors
Halide Bilge Türközer
Affiliation:
McLean Hospital, Belmont, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Department of Psychiatry, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA Department of Psychiatry, Marmara University School of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey
Tuna Hasoğlu
Affiliation:
McLean Hospital, Belmont, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Yue Chen
Affiliation:
McLean Hospital, Belmont, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Lesley Anne Norris
Affiliation:
McLean Hospital, Belmont, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Meredith Brown
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Nathaniel Delaney-Busch
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA
Emre H. Kale
Affiliation:
Brain Research Center, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey
Zahide Pamir
Affiliation:
Neuroscience Graduate Program, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Hüseyin Boyacı
Affiliation:
Neuroscience Graduate Program, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey Department of Psychology, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey Department of Psychology, JL Giessen University, Giessen, Germany
Gina Kuperberg
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Kathryn E. Lewandowski
Affiliation:
McLean Hospital, Belmont, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Volkan Topçuoğlu
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Marmara University School of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey
Dost Öngür*
Affiliation:
McLean Hospital, Belmont, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Dost Öngür, E-mail: dongur@partners.org
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Abstract

Background

The visual system is recognized as an important site of pathology and dysfunction in schizophrenia. In this study, we evaluated different visual perceptual functions in patients with psychotic disorders using a potentially clinically applicable task battery and assessed their relationship with symptom severity in patients, and with schizotypal features in healthy participants.

Methods

Five different areas of visual functioning were evaluated in patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder (n = 28) and healthy control subjects (n = 31) using a battery that included visuospatial working memory (VSWM), velocity discrimination (VD), contour integration, visual context processing, and backward masking tasks.

Results

The patient group demonstrated significantly lower performance in VD, contour integration, and VSWM tasks. Performance did not differ between the two groups on the visual context processing task and did not differ across levels of interstimulus intervals in the backward masking task. Performances on VSWM, VD, and contour integration tasks were correlated with negative symptom severity but not with other symptom dimensions in the patient group. VSWM and VD performances were also correlated with negative sychizotypal features in healthy controls.

Conclusion

Taken together, these results demonstrate significant abnormalities in multiple visual processing tasks in patients with psychotic disorders, adding to the literature implicating visual abnormalities in these conditions. Furthermore, our results show that visual processing impairments are associated with the negative symptom dimension in patients as well as healthy individuals.

Keywords

Context processingcontour integrationpsychosisschizophreniavelocity discriminationvisuospatial working memory
Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 49 , Issue 10 , July 2019 , pp. 1740 - 1748
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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