Visual impairments in schizophrenia

Michael Herzog, Maya Roinishvili
2016
Conference paper

The obvious symptoms of schizophrenia are hallucinations, delusions, and cognitive dysfunctions. However, schizophrenia patients have many other abnormalities, including visual impairments. Visual paradigms are versatile tools of schizophrenia research because patients׳ deficits are often very pronounced. Amongst the variety of techniques, visual masking has been shown to be one of the most sensitive visual tests. We have shown that unaffected relatives show clear performance deficits compared to controls. Moreover, in patients, performance deficits are stable over the time course of 18 months (Chkonia et al., 2010b). Hence, masking is an endophenotype and accordingly we found genetic correlates related to a deficient nicotinic system in the patients (Bakanidze et al., 2013). We propose that visual dysfunctions are emanations of general dysfunctions dedicated to deficient neuromodulation and thus offer insights into the causes of the disease.

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Visual system

The visual system comprises the sensory organ (the eye) and parts of the central nervous system (the retina containing photoreceptor cells, the optic nerve, the optic tract and the visual cortex) which gives organisms the sense of sight (the ability to detect and process visible light) as well as enabling the formation of several non-image photo response functions. It detects and interprets information from the optical spectrum perceptible to that species to "build a representation" of the surrounding environment.

Visual agnosia

Visual agnosia is an impairment in recognition of visually presented objects. It is not due to a deficit in vision (acuity, visual field, and scanning), language, memory, or intellect. While cortical blindness results from lesions to primary visual cortex, visual agnosia is often due to damage to more anterior cortex such as the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe(s) in the brain.[2] There are two types of visual agnosia: apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia. Recognition of visual objects occurs at two primary levels.

Visual impairment

Visual impairment, also known as vision impairment, is a medical definition primarily measured based on an individual's better eye visual acuity; in the absence of treatment such as corrective eyewear, assistive devices, and medical treatment– visual impairment may cause the individual difficulties with normal daily tasks including reading and walking. Low vision is a functional definition of visual impairment that is chronic, uncorrectable with treatment or conventional corrective lenses, and impacts daily living.

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