Understanding why patients with schizophrenia do not perceive the hollow-mask illusion using dynamic causal modelling
Abstract
Patients suffering from schizophrenia are less susceptible to various visual illusions. For example, healthy participants perceive a hollow mask as a normal face, presumably due to the strength of constraining top-down influences, while patients with schizophrenia do not (Schneider, U., Leweke, F.M., Sternemann, U., Weber, M.M., Emrich, H.M., 1996. Visual 3D illusion: a systems-theoretical approach to psychosis. Eur. Arch. Psychiatry Clin. Neurosci. 246, 256-260; Scheider, U., Borsutzky, M., Seifert, J., Leweke, F.M., Huber, T.J., Rollnik J.D., Emrich, H.M., 2002. Reduced binocular depth inversion in schizophrenic patients. Schizophrenia Research 53, 101-108.; Emrich, H.M., Leweke, F.M., Schneider, U., 1997. Towards a cannabinoid hypothesis of schizophrenia: cognitive impairments due to a dysregulation of the endogenous cannabinoid system. Pharmacol. Biochem. Behav. 56, 803-807). However the neural mechanisms underpinning this effect remain poorly understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the hollow-mask illusion in schizophrenic patients and healthy controls. The primary aim of this study was to use measures of effective connectivity arising from dynamic causal modelling (DCM) to explain differences in both the perception of the hollow-mask illusion and associated differences in neural responses between patients with schizophrenia and controls, which we hypothesised would be associated with difference in the influences of top-down and bottom-up processes between the groups. Consistent with this explanation, we identified differences between the two groups in effective connectivity. In particular, there was a strengthening of bottom-up processes, and weakening of top-down ones, during the presentation of 'hollow' faces for the patients. In contrast, the controls exhibited a strengthening of top-down processes when perceiving the same stimuli. These findings suggest that schizophrenic patients rely on stimulus-driven processing and are less able to employ conceptually-driven top-down strategies during perception, where incoming sensory data are constrained with reference to a generative model that entails stored information from past experience.
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Dima et al. showed a significant between-group difference in effective connectivity patterns during the visual illusion task.
“Using dynamic causal modeling (DCM), the authors notably showed a significant between-group difference in the effective connectivity patterns measured during the VI task.”
From What visual illusions teach us about schizophrenia (2014) · cites this paper as Dima et al., 2009
In healthy controls, a model with connectivity modulation from higher-level areas to V1 better accounted for data, whereas in schizophrenia patients DCM revealed a reverse pattern with predominance of feedforward modulation.
“While a model that places connectivity modulation from the higher-level areas to the primary visual cortex (i.e., V1) better accounted for healthy control data, the DCM revealed a reverse pattern in schizophrenia patients (i.e., the predominance of the feedforward modulation).”
From What visual illusions teach us about schizophrenia (2014) · cites this paper as Dima et al., 2009
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- Authors
- Dima, D., Roiser, J. P., Dietrich, D. E., Bonnemann, C., Lanfermann, H., Emrich, H. M., & Dillo, W.
- Affiliations
- Medizinische Hochschule Hannover (DE)
- University College London (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Dima, Danai
- Venue
- NeuroImage
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2009-07
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1180-1186
- ISSN
- 1053-8119 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2120794957
- Cited by
- 192
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 13 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 17 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 4.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- NeuroImage (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Research Portal (King's College London) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Schizophrenia research and treatment
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Hallucinations in medical conditions
- Keywords
- schizophrenia, visual perception, top-down processing, bottom-up processing, effective connectivity, dynamic causal modeling, stereopsis, optical illusions, generative models
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Face, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Schizophrenia
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