title: Assessing early processing of eye gaze in schizophrenia: measuring the cone of direct gaze and reflexive orienting of attention.
abstract: The accurate discrimination of another person's eye-gaze direction is vital as it provides a cue to the gazer's focus of attention, which in turn supports joint attention. Patients with schizophrenia have shown a "direct gaze bias" when judging gaze direction. However, current tasks do not dissociate an early perceptual bias from high-level top-down effects. We investigated early stages of gaze processing in schizophrenia by measuring perceptual sensitivity to fine deviations in gaze direction (i.e., the cone of direct gaze: CoDG) and ability to reflexively orient to locations cued by the same deviations.
  
  
  
  Twenty-four patients and 26 controls completed a CoDG discrimination task that used realistic direct-face images with six fine degrees of deviation (i.e., 3, 6 or 9 pixels to the left and right) and direct gaze, and a gaze cueing task that assessed reflexive orienting to the same fine-grained deviations.
  
  
  
  Our data showed patients exhibited no impairment in gaze discrimination, nor did we observe a reduced orienting response.
  
  
  
  These results suggest that while patients may suffer deficits associated with interpreting another person's gaze, the earliest processes concerned with detecting averted gaze and reflexively orienting to the gazed-at location are intact.
authors.affiliation: a ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.|b Department of Cognitive Science , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.|c School of Psychology , The University of New South Wales , Sydney , Australia.
authors.forename: Kiley
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Seymour
authors.affiliation: a ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.|d School of Psychology , The University of Western Australia , Perth , Australia.
authors.forename: Gillian
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rhodes
authors.affiliation: a ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.|b Department of Cognitive Science , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: McGuire
authors.affiliation: a ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.|b Department of Cognitive Science , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.
authors.forename: Nikolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.affiliation: a ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.|d School of Psychology , The University of Western Australia , Perth , Australia.
authors.forename: Linda
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jeffery
authors.affiliation: a ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.|b Department of Cognitive Science , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.
authors.forename: Robyn
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Langdon
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology
keywords: Schizophrenia; cone of direct gaze; gaze cueing; gaze processing; social cognition