Visual Context Processing in Schizophrenia

Abnormal perceptual experiences are central to schizophrenia, but the nature of these anomalies remains undetermined. We investigated contextual processing abnormalities across a comprehensive set of visual tasks. For perception of luminance, size, contrast, orientation, and motion, we quantified the degree to which the surrounding visual context altered a center stimulus’s appearance. Healthy participants showed robust contextual effects across all tasks, as evidenced by pronounced misperceptions of center stimuli. Schizophrenia patients exhibited intact contextual modulations of luminance and size but showed weakened contextual modulations of contrast, performing more accurately than controls. Strong motion and orientation context effects correlated with worse symptoms and social functioning. Importantly, the overall strength of contextual modulation across tasks did not differ between controls and schizophrenia patients. In addition, performance measures across contextual tasks were uncorrelated, implying discrete underlying processes. These findings reveal that abnormal contextual modulation in schizophrenia is selective, arguing against the proposed unitary contextual processing dysfunction.