Vision science and schizophrenia research: toward a re-view of the disorder. Editors' introduction to special section

Abstract

This theme section on vision science and schizophrenia research demonstrates that our understanding of the disorder could be significantly accelerated by a greater adoption of the methods of vision science. In this introduction, we briefly describe what vision science is, how it has advanced our understanding of schizophrenia, and what challenges and opportunities lay ahead regarding schizophrenia research. We then summarize the articles that follow. These include reviews of abnormal form perception (perceptual organization and backward masking) and motion processing, and an article on reduced size contrast illusions experienced by hearing but not deaf persons with schizophrenia. These articles reveal that the methods of basic vision research can provide insights into a number of aspects of the disorder, including pathophysiology, development, cognition, social cognition, and phenomenology. Importantly, studies of visual processing in schizophrenia make it clear that there are impairments in the functioning of basic neural mechanisms (e.g., center-surround modulation, contextual modulation of feedforward processing, reentrant processing) that are found throughout the cortex and that are operative in multiple forms of cognitive dysfunction in the illness. Such evidence allows for an updated view of schizophrenia as a condition involving generalized failures in neural network formation and maintenance, as opposed to a primary failure in a higher level factor (e.g., cognitive control) that accounts for all other types of perceptual and cognitive dysfunction. Finally, studies of vision in schizophrenia can identify sensitive probes of neural functioning that can be used as biomarkers of treatment response.

Fig. 1.

PubMed citations by brain region, for regions commonly studied in schizophrenia research, as of December 1, 2010. All items are searched in conjunction with the term “schizophrenia.”

Fig. 2.

PubMed citations by cognitive function (searched in conjunction with the term “schizophrenia”) as of December 1, 2010. Note that the search for “vision and schizophrenia” returned only 253 articles. The general term “perception” was not used because it generated articles on nonvisual perception (eg, audition, olfaction), in addition to articles on topics such “perception of smoking risk”, etc. A similar problem was noted for a number of components of executive functioning, such as “planning”, “problem solving,” and “reasoning,” although it should be noted that the search for the single aspect of executive function known as “cognitive control” by itself retrieved 2030 items (when searched in conjunction with the term “schizophrenia”), nearly as many as the search on “visual perception and schizophrenia.”