Visual information processing in patients with schizophrenia: evidence for the impairment of central mechanisms

Patients with schizophrenia are especially impaired in the detection of spatial location if the briefly presented target stimulus is followed by a mask in a close temporal proximity (target location backward masking (BM) paradigm). It has been suggested that this phenomenon is related to the impairment of low spatial and high temporal frequency-sensitive transient (magnocellular) visual channels. To test this hypothesis, we measured target location BM and visual contrast sensitivity (CS) in clinically remitted patients with schizophrenia. In the BM task, subjects were asked to indicate the position of letters appearing at four possible spatial locations. In the CS test, a two-alternative forced choice method was used to measure the minimal contrast level required for the detection of horizontal gratings set at low spatial and high temporal frequencies (0.5 cycle/degree and 8 Hz, respectively). We found that the schizophrenia patients with normal CSs (spared transient channel functions) showed a marked deficit in the target location BM task. This suggests that the abnormality of subcortical transient channels does not explain some visual information processing dysfunctions in schizophrenia. Instead, deficient cortical interactions of rapidly changing environmental signals may be involved.