Increased fusiform area activation in schizophrenia during processing of spatial frequency-degraded faces, as revealed by fMRI

Background. People with schizophrenia demonstrate perceptual organization impairments, and these are thought to contribute to their face processing difficulties. Method. We examined the neural substrates of emotionally neutral face processing in schizophrenia by investigating neural activity under three stimulus conditions: faces characterized by the full spectrum of spatial frequencies, faces with low spatial frequency information removed [high spatial frequency (HSF) condition], and faces with high spatial frequency information removed [low spatial frequency (LSF) condition]. Face perception in the HSF condition is more reliant on local feature processing whereas perception in the LSF condition requires greater reliance on global form processing. Past studies of perceptual organization in schizophrenia indicate that patients perform relatively more poorly with degraded stimuli but also that, when global information is absent, patients may perform better than controls because of their relatively increased ability to initially process individual features. Therefore, we hypothesized that people with schizophrenia (n = 14) would demonstrate greater face processing difficulties than controls (n = 13) in the LSF condition, whereas they would demonstrate a smaller difference or superior performance in the HSF condition. Results. In a gender-discrimination task, behavioral data indicated high levels of accuracy for both groups, with a trend toward an interaction involving higher patient performance in the HSF condition and poorer patient performance in the LSF condition. Patients demonstrated greater activity in the fusiform gyrus compared to controls in both degraded conditions. Conclusions. These data suggest that impairments in basic integration abilities may be compensated for by relatively increased activity in this region.