Cognitive and Emotional Factors in Visual Exploration Among Patients With Schizophrenia

Background: Patients with schizophrenia are abnormally disturbed by information onsets, which may result in a disadvantage in filtering relevant information. It seems that they accord the same importance to all objects in a scene without taking into account the relevance of objects (cognitive salience) or their emotional charge (salience emotional). The paradigm of change blindness offers the interesting possibility of studying sensitivity to the sudden irruption of visual information with ecological stimuli in schizophrenia. An increased attentional capture by the irruption of visual information would suggest better performance in patients than in healthy controls. Moreover, patients are disturbed to processing of emotional information, in this way we would like to measure the impact of emotional salience on the visual exploration. Main aim: The main objective is to evaluate, if patients with schizophrenia quickly detect changes occurring on irrelevant objects in the understanding of the scene. Secondary objectives: To evaluate in patients with schizophrenia the impact of emotional salience using the same paradigm. To separate an explicit response (motors responses) with an implicit response (eye tracking measures). Methodology: 30 patients with schizophrenia and 30 healthy controls were asked to detect changes in 96 scenes with 0 or 1 change (neutral or emotional changes). We will measure the participants' speed and accuracy in explicitly reporting the changes via motor responses and their capacity to implicitly detect changes via eye movements.