You must be looking at me: The nature of gaze perception in schizophrenia patients

Abstract

Introduction. Accurately identifying gaze direction is an important component of successful social interaction. Preliminary research indicates that schizophrenia patients have deficits in gaze perception, but the nature of this deficit is still unclear. The current study investigates whether nonspecific perceptual abnormalities could explain gaze perception deficits and whether schizophrenia patients show a direct gaze bias in their judgement. Methods. Fifteen chronic schizophrenia patients and nineteen normal control participants made a direct gaze judgement for eyes in a face, and a centre judgement for a geometric shape in a scrambled face. Results. The data show that schizophrenia patients are as accurate as healthy control subjects at identifying direct gaze when it occurs but they are more likely to misinterpret averted gaze as directed at them. The pattern of results indicates that this tendency to endorse direct gaze is not a consequence of a perceptual deficit in judging angular displacement. Conclusions. Schizophrenia patients have a self-referential bias in judging the direction of gaze that could lead to the misinterpretation of another person's intentions during the course of social interaction.