What visual illusions teach us about schizophrenia
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience September 16, 2014 Charles-Edouard eNotredame, Delphine ePins, Sophie eDeneve et al.
Illusions—mismatches between objective and perceived properties of an object—are common in both normal and pathological vision, making them useful for studying perception and its impairments. A growing body of research suggests that people with schizophrenia show diminished susceptibility to illusions. This review examines how illusions have been used to investigate visual perception in schizophrenia from psychophysical, neurophysiological, and functional perspectives. The authors propose integrating these findings into a hierarchical Bayesian inference framework, where perception combines sensory evidence with prior knowledge. This framework offers a holistic explanation for perceptual changes in schizophrenia, which can be tested using illusory paradigms, and discusses implications for psychopathology, including positive symptoms and behavioral disruptions.