Adaptive coding occurs in object categorization and may not be associated with schizotypal personality traits

Area of Science:

• Cognitive neuroscience
• Psychology
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• The brain uses adaptive coding to process diverse sensory inputs.
• Individuals with high schizotypy exhibit reduced adaptive coding in reward processing.
• It remains unclear if these deficits extend to non-motivational domains like object categorization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate range adaptation in face/house categorization in healthy individuals with varying schizotypy levels.
• To determine if deficits in adaptive coding are specific to motivational domains or generalize to object perception.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel variant of a classic task to assess range adaptation.
• Participants categorized images along a face-house continuum presented in wide and narrow range blocks.
• Compared performance in overlapping stimulus ranges between narrow and wide blocks.

Main Results:

• Participants demonstrated efficient range adaptation, showing better performance in narrow range blocks.
• No significant reduction in range adaptation was observed in individuals with high schizotypy.
• Findings indicate that reduced range adaptation is not a domain-general characteristic of schizotypy.

Conclusions:

• Range adaptation in object categorization is efficient in healthy individuals.
• Schizotypy-related deficits in adaptive coding may be domain-specific, not generalizing to visual object processing.
• Further research is needed to understand the domain specificity of cognitive alterations in schizotypy.