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Neurological disorders

Shadow of perception in schizophrenia

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 6, page 4 (2005)Cite this article

In this study, 20 individuals with chronic schizophrenia and 20 control subjects were asked to perform the Gestalt perception task, in which they were shown images with or without an illusory square. Patients with schizophrenia made more errors in perceiving the square and had longer median reaction times than the healthy controls. The authors used a scalp-recorded electroencephalogram to measure the brain activity of the subjects while they were performing the task. The recordings produced signals in the gamma frequency range (30–80 Hz), which is believed to be associated with the generation of an object representation and reflects rhythmic synchronization of neural discharges in a given network.

There are two types of γ-band oscillation: an early phase that is evoked by stimulus presentation, and a later phase that is associated with the response. Spencer et al. found that stimuli that contained an illusory square, but not those that did not, elicited the early 'stimulus-locked' oscillation in the occipital cortex of normal subjects, whereas neither stimulus evoked this oscillation in patients with schizophrenia. In contrast, the 'response-locked' oscillation was observed in the occipital cortex of both groups, although the signals in patients with schizophrenia had a different latency and a much lower frequency. Interestingly, a second response-locked oscillation was found in the parietal cortex of patients with schizophrenia, and its shorter latency and wider frequency compared with the occipital oscillation indicate that it constituted separate effects.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Spencer, K. M. et al. Neural synchrony indexes disordered perception and cognition in schizophrenia. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 16 November 2004 (10.1173/pnas.0406074101)

FURTHER READING

  1. Engel, A. K. et al. Dynamic predictions: oscillations and synchrony in top-down processing. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 2, 704–716 (2001)

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Authors
  1. Jane Qiu
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Qiu, J. Shadow of perception in schizophrenia. Nat Rev Neurosci 6, 4 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1591

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