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Updated: Jan 30, 2026
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A Methodology for Capturing Joint Visual Attention Using Mobile Eye-Trackers
Published on: January 18, 2020
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Responding to joint attention bids in schizophrenia: An interactive eye-tracking study.
Nathan Caruana1,2, Kiley Seymour1,3, Jon Brock1,2
11 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|January 24, 2019
Summary
Patients with schizophrenia show altered responses to social cues. While they process eye gaze intent similarly to controls, they make more errors with gaze direction, suggesting hyper-responsivity to communicative intent.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Social cognition is often impaired in schizophrenia.
- Understanding social cue processing, like eye gaze, is crucial for schizophrenia research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate social cognition in schizophrenia using virtual reality.
- To examine how patients with schizophrenia evaluate and respond to eye gaze as a communicative cue.
Main Methods:
- A virtual reality paradigm with an interactive computer game was used.
- 21 schizophrenia patients and 21 healthy controls completed social and non-social trials.
- Participants interpreted and responded to gaze cues and arrow cues.
Main Results:
- Schizophrenia patients made more errors than controls in responding to gaze direction, but not arrow cues.
- Response times to gaze cues were similar between groups, but patients were slower with arrow cues.
- This pattern suggests a facilitation effect for communicative gaze cues in schizophrenia.
Conclusions:
- Patients with schizophrenia exhibit hyper-responsivity to communicative gaze cues.
- Findings suggest specific alterations in social information processing in schizophrenia.
- This research has implications for understanding and treating social deficits in schizophrenia.
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