J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 16:277-283, August 2004
© 2004 American Psychiatric Press, Inc.
The Reliability and Clinical Correlates of Figure-Ground Perception in Schizophrenia
Dolores Malaspina, M.D.,
Naomi Simon, M.D.,
Raymond R. Goetz, Ph.D.,
Cheryl Corcoran, M.D.,
Eliza Coleman, M.A.,
David Printz, M.D.,
Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, Ph.D. and
Rachel Wolitzky, B.A.
Received May 6, 2002; revised January 16, 2003; accepted February 3, 2003. From the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, New York, New York; Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts; and New York University Department of Psychology, New York, New York. Address correspondence to Dr. Malaspina, New York State Psychiatric Institute, 1051 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10032; dm9{at}columbia.edu (E-mail).
Schizophrenia subjects are impaired in a number of visual attention paradigms. However, their performance on tests of figure-ground visual perception (FGP), which requires subjects to visually discriminate figures embedded in a rival background, is relatively unstudied. We examined FGP in 63 schizophrenia patients and 27 control subjects and found that the patients performed the FGP test reliably and had significantly lower FGP scores than the control subjects. Figure-ground visual perception was significantly correlated with other neuropsychological test scores and was inversely related to negative symptoms. It was unrelated to antipsychotic medication treatment. Figure-ground visual perception depends on "top down" processing of visual stimuli, and thus this data suggests that dysfunction in the higher-level pathways that modulate visual perceptual processes may also be related to a core defect in schizophrenia.
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