PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA.
Item
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Title
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PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA.
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Identifier
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AAI8611371
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identifier
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8611371
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Creator
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ORLOWSKI, BARBARA KATCHER.
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Contributor
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Mitchell L. Kietzman
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Date
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1986
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Physiological
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Abstract
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Previous research has indicated that a perceptual oarganizational deficit, as measured by response accuracy, appears to exist for schizophrenic persons in an early stage of visual perceptual processing. The present experiment was designed to determine whether the differences in perceptual organization among schizophrenic and two groups of normal subjects (young and elderly) were also reflected in response latency (reaction time).;Subjects were presented with three to six horizontal and/or vertical bars of light placed at the points of an imaginary hexagon. The bars of light in each stimulus display were presented in one of three crosscutting conditions of perceptual organization which increased in complexity: a Homogeneous condition (either all horizontal or all vertical bars), a Heterogeneous/Adjacent condition (horizontal bars adjacent to vertical bars), and a Heterogeneous/Nonadjacent condition (alternating horizontal and vertical bars). The subjects were told only to report the number of bars presented. Subjects were tested twice: near hospital admission and close to discharge. With a voice microphone, reaction time and response accuracy were measured simultaneously.;The results indicated that as the number of bars increased, reaction times of the schizophrenic subjects increased less than the reaction times of the control subjects. Significantly faster reaction times for schizophrenic subjects (p < .02) were obtained independently of accuracy. Schizophrenic subjects were significantly faster than control subjects for five and six bar displays but did not differ significantly for three and four bar displays.;This result for control subjects could represent an increase in the time used to view the display globally as a hexagon and to view the five and six bar displays of the heterogeneous conditions. The faster reaction times for the schizophrenic subjects can be interpreted as indicating that schizophrenic persons tend to ignore the perceptual grouping conditions and the hexagon formation of the stimulus displays. Faster reaction times of the schizophrenic subjects were therefore interpreted to mean that schizophrenic subjects were less engaged in task-irrelevant global processing than normal subjects, and therefore took less time to count the stimuli.;The present study provides support for a perceptual organizational deficit in schizophrenia.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
