Comparison of visual perceptual organization in schizophrenia and body dysmorphic disorder

Abstract

People with schizophrenia are impaired at organizing potentially ambiguous visual information into well-formed shape and object representations. This perceptual organization (PO) impairment has not been found in other psychiatric disorders. However, recent data on body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), suggest that BDD may also be characterized by reduced PO. Similarities between these groups could have implications for understanding the RDoC dimension of visual perception in psychopathology, and for modeling symptom formation across these two conditions. We compared patients with SCZ (n=24) to those with BDD (n=20), as well as control groups of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients (n=20) and healthy controls (n=20), on two measures of PO that have been reliably associated with schizophrenia-related performance impairment. On both the contour integration and Ebbinghaus illusion tests, only the SCZ group demonstrated abnormal performance relative to controls; the BDD group performed similarly to the OCD and CON groups. In addition, on both tasks, the SCZ group performed more abnormally than the BDD group. Overall, these data suggest that PO reductions observed in SCZ are not present in BDD. Visual processing impairments in BDD may arise instead from other perceptual disturbances or attentional biases related to emotional factors.

Six Years of Research on the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Initiative: A Systematic Review

“…Research on Cognitive Systems has been considerable and diverse, with eighteen studies published on four of the six constructs within the domain (e.g., Cognitive Control: Lopez-Garcia et al (2016); Perception: Silverstein et al (2015); Attention: Kleinman et al (2015); and Working Memory: Francazio and Flessner (2015)). To elaborate on one example, Chan et al (2015) demonstrated how a standard performance-monitoring event-related potential paradigm can be used within an RDoC framework to examine Cognitive Control and Performance Monitoring systems.…”

“…A transdiagnostic approach to the study of the Visual Perception Cognitive System was adopted by Silverstein et al (2015). This work investigated disturbances in perceptual organization across patients with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and schizophrenia, which are two patient groups defined in part by perceptual distortions.…”

Psychiatric Disorders and General Functioning in Low Birth Weight Adults: A Longitudinal Study

“…Body dysmorphic disorder also shares features with psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia. 30 Body dysmorphic and bipolar disorders are considered severe psychiatric disorders and the longterm development and clinical implications in low birth weight individuals is uncertain.…”

A Bayesian model comparison approach to test the specificity of visual integration impairment in schizophrenia or psychosis

“…This shift away from diagnostic categories (e.g., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders; DSM) to functional dimensions linked with pathophysiology (e.g., visual perception; Insel et al, 2010; Insel, 2014) may improve our understanding of psychopathology through a data-driven approach. In line with this effort, visual integration has been examined in other psychiatric disorders with clinical manifestations suggesting abnormal visual perception, including body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder; however, no impairment was found in these disorders when compared with healthy controls and schizophrenia (Silverstein et al, 2015a). It remains unclear, nevertheless, whether visual integration is affected in disorders in which psychosis is always present or highly prevalent, particularly those considered to be on the “schizophrenia-bipolar psychosis spectrum” (Keshavan et al, 2011).…”