Nonconscious and conscious color priming in schizophrenia

Deficits in visual processing are well established in schizophrenia. However, there is conflicting evidence about whether these deficits start before the formation of percepts because visual processing studies in schizophrenia have typically examined the processing of consciously registered stimuli. In this study, we used nonconscious color priming to evaluate the very early visual processing stages in schizophrenia. Nonconscious and conscious color priming was assessed in 148 schizophrenia patients and 54 healthy control subjects. In both conditions, subjects identified the color of a ring preceded by a disk (prime) in the same color (congruent) or a different color (incongruent). The ring rendered the disk invisible in the nonconscious condition (SOA of 62.5 ms) or did not mask the disk (SOA of 200 ms) in the conscious condition. Schizophrenia patients exhibited a color priming effect (longer reaction times in the incongruent vs. congruent trials) that was similar to healthy controls in both the nonconscious and conscious priming conditions. Healthy controls had a significantly larger priming effect in the nonconscious vs. conscious condition, but patients did not show a significant difference in priming effects between the two conditions. Our results indicate that schizophrenia patients do not have deficits at the nonconscious, pre-perceptual stages of visual processing, suggesting that the feed forward sweep of information processing (from retina to V1) might be intact in schizophrenia. These results imply that the well-documented visual processing deficits in this illness likely occur at later, percept-dependent stages of processing.