Students are requested to submit an abstract, as for a standard conference, as shown below:
Everything I see is split up: Context processing in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders. Sivakumar Anandaciva and Bill Phillips. “Everything I see is split up. The mountains which are outlined in the swellings of the oxygen are beautiful.” This quote from a patient with schizophrenia illustrates the fragmentation of cognitive and perceptual processes that is a core feature of schizophrenic psychopathology. Phillips and Silverstein (in press) propose that this fragmentation may result from a failure to use contextual information. Reduced sensitivity to linguistic context may manifest as contextually inappropriate intrusions of normal associations (e.g. using the chemical term for ‘fresh air’ in the quote above) (Spitzer et al., 1994), and reduced sensitivity to visual context may manifest as impaired perceptual organization of a visual scene (“Everything I see is split up”). The present study investigated the relationship between linguistic context processing, visual context processing, and schizophrenic symptomatolgy using (1) a linguistic contextual disambiguation task (2) a visual size-perception task (3) a visual closure task. The results indicate that reduced visual context sensitivity is not a general feature of schizophrenia spectrum disorders; impaired use of contextual information was primarily associated with disorganized symptomatology. The results provide further evidence that schizophrenic clinical symptomatology and impaired perceptual organization may result from an underlying deficit in the use of contextual information.
You can watch a video of this talk: HERE