Identification of brief presentations of facial expressions of affects in schizophrenics

Two experiments were designed to test information extraction capacity from briefly shown photographs depicting simple familiar objects and facial/affective stimuli. Photographs were presented tachistoscopically at six exposure times, 1 sec, 200 msec, 40 msec, 20 msec, 4 msec, 2 msec, to chronic schizophrenic patients, general medical patients, and nonpatient control subjects. Experiment 1 was conducted using the number of correct responses (true scores) and experiment 2 using the number of trials taken (error scores) to identify the tazget stimuli, as the dependent measures. In experiment 1, schizophrenics did not differ from general medical patients but both were inferior to nonpatient controls in identifying brief visual stimuli. However, in experiment 2, schizophrenics required significantly more trials than general medical patients, who in turn required significantly more trials than nonpatient controls in identifying brief visual stimuli.