Not socially blind: Unimpaired perception of social interaction in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia has been commonly found to have deficits in social perception, such as face perception, emotion perception, and affective prosody perception. However, existing findings on perception of social interactive stimuli were still largely inconclusive. Here, we adopted an ecologically valid interactive-dyads paradigm to further investigate this unsolved issue. As previous studies found healthy individuals showed faster in searching for a social interactive target (face-to-face agent) than non-social interactive one (back-to-back agent), here we tested whether patients with schizophrenia (PSZ) could comparably benefit from social interactive information as healthy control subjects (HCS). Thirty-five PSZ and thirty-five HCS participated in a visual search task. During the task, they were required to find a face-to-face target (Facing condition) or a back-to-back target (Non-facing condition) along with other three distractors (two agents facing in the same direction) as accurately and quickly as possible. Participants in both groups showed significantly faster response time in finding the social interactive target (face-to-face) in comparison with non-interactive one (back-to-back). Interestingly, such an advantage of searching for social interactive stimuli was intact in medicated stable PSZ, and the searching benefit was comparable, if not larger, to HCS. The current study suggests that PSZ with stable medication regimen were able to use the social interactive information effectively to facilitate their visual search performance, which has significant implications in expanding our understanding of the interactive aspect of social perception in schizophrenia.