No Correlation Between Perception of Meaning and Positive Schizotypy in a Female College Sample.

Ubuka Tagami,Shu Imaizumi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01323

Abstract

We visually perceive meaning from stimuli in the external world. There are inter-individual variations in the perception of meaning. A candidate factor to explain this variation is positive schizotypy, which is a personality analogous to positive symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., visual hallucination). The present study investigated the relationship between positive schizotypy, and the perception of meaning derived from meaningful and meaningless visual stimuli. Positive schizotypy in Japanese female undergraduates (n = 35) was assessed by the Cognitive-Perceptual dimension of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. The participants were asked to report what they saw in noise-degraded images of meaningful objects (Experiment 1) and to respond whether the objects were meaningful (Experiment 2A) and which paired objects were meaningful (Experiment 2B). Positive schizotypy (i.e., Cognitive-Perceptual score) did not correlate with time to detect meaningful objects, and with false-alarm rates, sensitivity, and response criterion in the perception of meaning from meaningful and meaningless stimuli. These results were against our hypothesis and contradicted previous findings. The inconsistencies are discussed in terms of different methods (e.g., stimulus category) and conditions (e.g., paranormal beliefs).

Highlights

In everyday life, we discriminate between useful and useless information by perceiving or extracting meaning from visual stimuli in the external world (Griffiths and Tenenbaum, 2007)
The present study investigated the relationship between the perception of meaning in visual stimuli and positive schizotypy in a non-clinical Japanese sample
The present study can contribute to an accumulation of data for the elucidation of perceptions and symptoms in schizophrenia and schizophrenic spectrum

Summary

Introduction

We discriminate between useful and useless information by perceiving or extracting meaning from visual stimuli in the external world (Griffiths and Tenenbaum, 2007). The perception of meaning relies on our visual system as well as stochastic neural activity (Wild and Busey, 2004), stored representations (Gosselin and Schyns, 2003), and psychological states (Balcetis and Dunning, 2006). In addition to these intra-individual variations, there is substantial interindividual variation in the perception of meaning. The perception of meaning may be associated with positive symptoms in schizophrenia as characterized by, for example, visual and auditory hallucinations (Sass and Parnas, 2003) and paranormal beliefs (Shiah et al, 2014). Detailed mechanisms of perception of meaning in patients with schizophrenia are yet to be fully understood, perhaps because it may be difficult to perform extensive experiments on patients due to reduced cognitive abilities, confounding effects of medication, and/or recruiting reasons

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