title: Impaired recognition of communicative interactions from biological motion in schizophrenia.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Patients with schizophrenia are deficient in multiple aspects of social cognition, including biological motion perception. In the present study we investigated the ability to read social information from point-light stimuli in schizophrenia.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Participants with paranoid schizophrenia and healthy controls were presented with a biological motion task depicting point-light actions of two agents either engaged in a communicative interaction, or acting independently of each other. For each stimulus, participants were asked to decide whether the two agents were communicating vs. acting independently of each other (task A), and to select the correct action description among five response alternatives (task B). Participants were also presented with a mental rotation task to assess their visuospatial abilities, and with a facial emotion recognition task tapping social cognition. Results revealed that participants with schizophrenia performed overall worse than controls both in discriminating communicative from non-communicative actions (task A) and in selecting which of the 5 response alternatives best described the observed actions (task B). Interestingly, the impaired performance of schizophrenic participants was mainly due to misclassification of non-communicative stimuli as communicative actions. Correlation analysis revealed that visuospatial abilities predicted performance in task A but not in task B, while facial emotion recognition abilities was correlated with performance in both task A and task B.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These findings are consistent with theories of "overmentalizing" (excessive attribution of intentionality) in schizophrenia, and suggest that processing social information from biological motion does rely on social cognition abilities.
authors: Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
authors: Łukasz
authors: Ł
authors: Okruszek
authors: Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
authors: Maciej
authors: M
authors: Haman
authors: Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
authors: Kasper
authors: K
authors: Kalinowski
authors: Department of Adult Psychiatry, Medical University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland.
authors: Monika
authors: M
authors: Talarowska
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy; Department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.
authors: Cristina
authors: C
authors: Becchio
authors: CoBtek Laboratory, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France.
authors: Valeria
authors: V
authors: Manera
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003142:Communication; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009039:Motion Perception; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012563:Schizophrenia, Paranoid / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012919:Social Behavior; D013028:Space Perception; D055815:Young Adult