Schizophrenic Brains Not Fooled by Optical Illusion |

WIRED
Annotation, discussion, and posting of an optical illusion with
opinion of it due 11/10

Schizophrenia sufferers arent fooled by an optical illusion known as the hollow

mask that the rest of us fall for because connections between the sensory and
conceptual areas of their brains might be on the fritz.
In the hollow mask illusion, viewers perceive a concave face (like the back side of a
hollow mask) as a normal convex face. The illusion exploits our brains strategy for
making sense of the visual world: uniting what it actually sees known as bottomup processing with what it expects to see based on prior experience known as
top-down processing.
"Our top-down processing holds memories, like stock models," explains Danai
Dima of Hannover Medical University, in Germany, co-author of a study in
NeuroImage. "All the models in our head have a face coming out, so whenever we
see a face, of course it has to come out." This powerful expectation overrides
visual cues, like shadows and depth information, that indicate anything to the
contrary.
But patients with schizophrenia are undeterred by implausibility: They see the
hollow face for what it is. About seven out of 1000 Americans suffer from the
disease, which is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and poor planning.

Some psychologists believe this dissociation from reality may result from an
imbalance between bottom-up and top-down processing a hypothesis ripe for
testing using the hollow mask illusion.
P
In healthy viewers, the illusion is so powerful that even when aware of the illusion
(see video below), they are unable to see the concave face the mind just flips it
back. Though the illusion is strong for faces, it doesnt work well with other objects,
or even with upside-down faces. This bias is likely due to the special relationship
we humans have with faces. Many neuroscientists believe we have brain regions
dedicated to processing faces, and some brain injuries can leave patients unable to
recognize faces, even though their vision and other memories remain intact.
Dima and Jonathan Roiser of University College London wanted to understand why
people with schizophrenia arent fooled. They put 13 schizophrenia patients and 16
healthy control subjects in an fMRI scanner that measures brain activity, and
showed them 3D images of concave or convex faces. As expected, all of the
schizophrenic patients reported seeing the concave faces, while none of the
control subjects did.
Dima and Roiser analyzed the fMRI data using a relatively new technique called
dynamic causal modeling, which allowed them to measure how different brain
regions were interacting during the task. When healthy subjects looked at the
concave faces, connections strengthened between the frontoparietal network,
which is involved in top-down processing, and the visual areas of the brain that
receive information from the eyes. In patients with schizophrenia, no such
strengthening occurred.
Dima thinks when healthy subjects see the illusion, which is somewhat ambiguous,
their brains strengthen this connection such that what they expect a normal
face becomes more influential, overpowering the actual, though unlikely, visual
information. Schizophrenia patients, meanwhile, may be unable to modulate this
pathway, accepting the concave face as reality.

Schizophrenics arent the only ones who see the concave face people who are
drunk or high can also beat the illusion. A similar disconnect between what the
brain sees and what it expects to see may be occurring during these drug-induced
states.
Citation: "Understanding why patients with schizophrenia do not perceive the
hollow-mask illusion using dynamic causal modelling" by Danai Dima, Jonathan P.
Roiser, Detlef E. Dietrich, Catharina Bonnemann, Heinrich Lanfermann, Hinderk M.
Emrich, Wolfgang Dillo, NeuroImage, In Press, Available online 24 March 2009.
P