Perceptual organization, the disorganization syndrome, and context processing in chronic schizophrenia

Schizophrenia patients' perceptual organization abilities were assessed wit h a psychophysically well-controlled measure of contour integration. Compar ed with psychiatric and staff controls, schizophrenia patients were less ab le to detect contours comprising Gabor elements as the detection of these c ontours relied increasingly on long-range spatial interactions. Impaired ta sk performance was also found to correlate significantly with higher levels of disorganized symptomatology. These data provide further evidence for im paired perceptual grouping in schizophrenia. In addition, the findings supp ort the hypothesis that a common cortical processing algorithm involving co ntextual coordination is impaired in schizophrenia, leading to reduced bind ing of object features in vision, and reduced contextual disambiguation of linguistic information during thought and speech. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.