Impaired recognition of communicative interactions from biological motion in schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia are deficient in multiple aspects of social cognition, including biological motion perception. In the present study we investigated the ability to read social information from point-light stimuli in schizophrenia.

Participants with paranoid schizophrenia and healthy controls were presented with a biological motion task depicting point-light actions of two agents either engaged in a communicative interaction, or acting independently of each other. For each stimulus, participants were asked to decide whether the two agents were communicating vs. acting independently of each other (task A), and to select the correct action description among five response alternatives (task B). Participants were also presented with a mental rotation task to assess their visuospatial abilities, and with a facial emotion recognition task tapping social cognition. Results revealed that participants with schizophrenia performed overall worse than controls both in discriminating communicative from non-communicative actions (task A) and in selecting which of the 5 response alternatives best described the observed actions (task B). Interestingly, the impaired performance of schizophrenic participants was mainly due to misclassification of non-communicative stimuli as communicative actions. Correlation analysis revealed that visuospatial abilities predicted performance in task A but not in task B, while facial emotion recognition abilities was correlated with performance in both task A and task B.

These findings are consistent with theories of "overmentalizing" (excessive attribution of intentionality) in schizophrenia, and suggest that processing social information from biological motion does rely on social cognition abilities.