Visual Perspective Taking of Patients with Schizophrenia

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2021, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (6) : 1499-1505.

PDF(644 KB)
PDF(644 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2021, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (6) : 1499-1505.

Visual Perspective Taking of Patients with Schizophrenia

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Abstract

Visual perspective-taking (VPT) is ability predict the visual experience of another agent (their meaning, intentions, desires, and knowledge). It could help people to understand others’ standpoint, thereby increased relations with others. VPT is typically divided into one of two dimensions: one that simply assesses what someone else can see (“Level 1” perspective taking), and another that requires participants to adopt someone else’s spatial point of view to judge how that person sees a particular visual stimulus (“Level 2” perspective taking). If someone lose the ability of VPT, symptoms characteristic of psychopathy may occur, such as delusion, hallucination. Social function of patient with schizophrenia would influence by VPT. The present study analyzed the mental mechanisms and neural mechanism of VPT in patient with schizophrenia. The result showed that the ability of VPT in patient with schizophrenia have certain defects. More concretely, in VPT task, patients with schizophrenia display increased egocentric intrusion and decreased altercentric intrusion compared to controls, it means patients may failure to inhibit one’s own perspective when trying to take another’s. It fit the core symptom of self-disorder model of schizophrenia, hyper-reflexivity, refers to an exaggerated self-consciousness, a tendency (fundamentally nonvolitional) for focal attention to be directed toward processes and phenomena that would normally be “inhabited” or experienced (tacitly) as part of oneself. The process of VPT usually need the synergy work with right temporo-parietal junction, ventral medial prefrontal cortex and ventral precuneus. Patients with schizophrenia showed revealed hypoactivity in the medial prefrontal (anterior cingulate) and orbitofrontal cortices during VPT trials compared to control trials relative to healthy controls. It would manifest disruptions are present in the most fundamental aspects of VPT in patients with schizophrenia, and that these disruptions impact higher-order social information processing. There are two possible factor that could influent the VPT of patients with schizophrenia. Accumulating evidence suggests that patients with schizophrenia exhibit deficits in response inhibition. During VPT, patient may could not suppress an irrelevant response or impulse from self. As a concrete manifestation of extremely egocentric intrusion when need to take others perspective. The deficit would affect both level 1 and level 2 VPT. On the other hand, VPT also need the ability of mental rotation, it may only affect level 2 VPT, because of level 2 VPT requires participants to adopt someone else’s spatial point of view to judge how that person sees a particular visual stimulus. Patients with schizophrenia have been proved deficit in mental rotation task, they showed lower responses and poorer accuracy compared to control group. Exhibit and mental rotation are considered an important component of executive function and influences daily functioning. The ability of VPT could be improve if the ability of exhibit and mental rotation were improved. At present, cognition training is an effective means which could improves cognitive function (e.g., exhibit, mental rotation) of patients with schizophrenia. Future studies should explore the effect of cognition training on VPT in schizophrenia and adopt neuro-physiological methods to explore other factor which may affect the ability of VPT in patients with schizophrenia.

Key words

Perspective taking / Egocentric intrusion / Response inhibition / Mental rotation / Cognitive intervention

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Visual Perspective Taking of Patients with Schizophrenia[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2021, 44(6): 1499-1505
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