Bistable Perception Discriminates Between Depressive Patients, Controls, Schizophrenia Patients, and Their Siblings.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Perceptual Psychology

Background:

• Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit reduced reliance on prior experiences for interpreting stimuli.
• This difference in priors is hypothesized to manifest as altered alternation rates in bistable perception tasks.
• The Structure-from-Motion (SfM) paradigm is a visual task where perception of 2D motion shifts between 3D interpretations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate differences in perceptual priors between healthy controls, schizophrenia patients, their siblings, and depression patients.
• To evaluate the utility of the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) paradigm as a potential endophenotype for schizophrenia.

Main Methods:

• Participants included healthy controls, patients with schizophrenia, siblings of patients with schizophrenia, and patients with depression.
• The intermittent and continuous variants of the SfM paradigm were employed.

Main Results:

• In the intermittent SfM, schizophrenia patients and their siblings showed significantly higher alternation rates compared to controls and depression patients.
• Depression patients had the lowest alternation rates in the intermittent SfM.
• In the continuous SfM, schizophrenia patients had the shortest mean percept durations; no differences were observed among other groups.

Conclusions:

• The intermittent SfM paradigm is a potential endophenotype for schizophrenia.
• Aberrant processing in schizophrenia may involve altered adaptation or cross-inhibition mechanisms affecting priors.
• The intermittent SfM paradigm can serve as a trait marker for studying perceptual abnormalities across the psychiatric spectrum.