Biomedical subjects

Bruno Breitmeyer

Publications and source records attributed to Bruno Breitmeyer.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Exploring the short term visual store in schizophrenia using the attentional blink.

Schizophrenia patients exhibit numerous deficits on visual processing tasks, ranging from very early stages of visual processing (e.g., backward masking) to the later working memory stages (e.g., delayed match-to-sample, N-back). However, little is known about deficits in an intermediate stage of visual information processing, namely short term visual memory (STVM). The attentional blink (AB) paradigm is considered to be a valid way to assess the STVM, and recent studies have reported AB deficits in schizophrenia. However, it is not clear whether the reported AB deficit in schizophrenia patients is due to their increased susceptibility to backward masking or increased vulnerability in the STVM. In this study we first found poorer performance in the AB task in 37 schizophrenia patients compared to 26 normal controls. To examine the effects of increasing and decreasing mask strength on AB performance in patients and controls, we next systematically varied the masking effect by varying the length of the distracters immediately following the targets. The manipulation had relatively little effect on the patient--control differences and patients continued to show an enhanced AB effect across conditions. The findings suggest that the enhanced AB effect in schizophrenia reflects an abnormality in their short term visual memory, as opposed to their enhanced susceptibility to visual masking.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Forward and backward visual masking in unaffected siblings of schizophrenic patients.

BACKGROUND: Visual masking tasks assess the earliest stages of visual processing. This study examined visual masking performance for forward and backward masking tasks in siblings of schizophrenic patients and healthy comparison subjects. METHODS: A staircase method was used to ensure that unmasked target identification was equivalent across subjects to eliminate differences due to discrimination of simple perceptual inputs. Four computerized visual masking tasks were administered to 43 siblings of patients and 42 normal comparison subjects. The tasks included: 1) locating a target; 2) identifying a target with a high-energy mask; 3) identifying a target with a low-energy mask; and 4) a paracontrast/metacontrast procedure with nonoverlapping target and mask. RESULTS: Across masking conditions, there was a significant group by forward/backward interaction, meaning that siblings showed a larger difference from control subjects in backward versus forward masking. This group difference was more pronounced in the location condition. CONCLUSIONS: These results support the theory that visual masking procedures may be indicators of vulnerability to schizophrenia. The pattern of findings in this report (larger group differences on backward versus forward masking and on the location condition) suggests that the activity of transient visual channels may be particularly linked to vulnerability.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Event-related gamma activity in schizophrenia patients during a visual backward-masking task.

OBJECTIVE: Schizophrenia patients experience deficits in many aspects of cognition and perception. Abnormalities in gamma activity may underlie some of these deficits, including rapid processing of visual stimuli. This study examined event-related gamma range activity during a visual backward-masking task in schizophrenia patients and normal comparison subjects. METHOD: Event-related gamma activity was recorded in 15 normal comparison subjects and 32 schizophrenia patients. Participants had event-related gamma activity recorded while viewing 60 unmasked visual targets and 240 trials of visual backward masking. Effects of group, accuracy (correct versus incorrect), stimulus-onset asynchrony, and regional activity (left versus right hemisphere, anterior versus posterior regions) were assessed. RESULTS: Schizophrenia patients had significantly reduced gamma activity in relation to comparison subjects during the backward-masking task. Normal comparison subjects showed significantly greater gamma activity in the right hemisphere, whereas schizophrenia patients did not show this pattern of lateralization. For the unmasked target, there was no group effect and no significant interactions in gamma-band responses. CONCLUSIONS: These results extend previous findings of abnormal gamma range activity in schizophrenia patients. Patients showed overall less gamma activity and failed to show lateralization of activity to the right hemisphere during masking, but they showed comparable levels of gamma activity to unmasked stimuli. Schizophrenia patients' poorer performance during a masking task may be partly influenced by this abnormal level and the distribution of gamma activity.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Modulation of attention during visual masking in schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: Schizophrenia patients consistently demonstrate performance deficits on visual masking procedures. The present study examined whether attentional manipulation would improve subjects' performance on visual masking. METHOD: A metacontrast task was administered to 105 schizophrenia patients and 52 healthy comparison subjects. Attention was manipulated by associating selected trials of the task with monetary reward. RESULTS: Schizophrenia patients exhibited poorer performance than the comparison subjects across conditions. Patients demonstrated modest, but statistically significant, improvement in performance with the attentional manipulation. This improvement was not significant for the comparison subjects. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that early visual processes in schizophrenia are responsive to attentional manipulation but that the degree of improvement is relatively small, suggesting that these processes are not easily altered.

Attention↗

PubMed2004

Paracontrast and metacontrast in schizophrenia: clarifying the mechanism for visual masking deficits.

Schizophrenic patients consistently demonstrate performance deficits on visual masking procedures. Visual masking can occur through two distinctly different mechanisms: interruption and integration. One highly effective way to limit the masking mechanism to interruption is to use a mask that surrounds, but does not spatially overlap, the target. These procedures are called paracontrast and metacontrast (for forward and backward masking, respectively). Despite their clear advantages for interpretation, paracontrast and metacontrast have not been used previously in schizophrenia. In the present study, we examined the reliability of the paracontrast and metacontrast procedures by administering these tasks to 103 schizophrenic patients and 49 normal control subjects. In addition, we compared the results to those from a low-energy masking condition, which is an alternative way to limit masking to interruption. Patients showed deficits on both the paracontrast and metacontrast procedures. The deficits in paracontrast and metacontrast were comparable to those seen previously with low-energy masking. These results suggest that the paracontrast/metacontrast procedure and the procedure using a low-energy mask are roughly equally sensitive to deficits in early visual processing among schizophrenic patients. These results bolster previous conclusions that schizophrenic patients show deficits on visual masking tasks even when masking on those tasks occurs entirely through the interruption mechanism.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Feedback contributions to visual awareness in human occipital cortex.

It has traditionally been assumed that processing within the visual system proceeds in a bottom-up, feedforward manner from retina to higher cortical areas. In addition to feedforward processing, it is now clear that there are also important contributions to sensory encoding that rely upon top-down, feedback (reentrant) projections from higher visual areas to lower ones. By utilizing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in a metacontrast masking paradigm, we addressed whether feedback processes in early visual cortex play a role in visual awareness. We show that TMS of visual cortex, when timed to produce visual suppression of an annulus serving as a metacontrast mask, induces recovery of an otherwise imperceptible disk. In addition to producing disk recovery, TMS suppression of an annulus was greater when a disk preceded it than when an annulus was presented alone. This latter result suggests that there are effects of the disk on the perceptibility of the subsequent mask that are additive and are revealed with TMS of the visual cortex. These results demonstrate spatial and temporal interactions of conscious vision in visual cortex and suggest that a prior visual stimulus can influence subsequent perception at early stages of visual encoding via feedback projections.

Feedback, Physiological↗

PubMed2003

Visual masking as a probe for abnormal gamma range activity in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Visual masking procedures assess very early stages of visual perception. Patients with schizophrenia consistently show deficits on visual masking tasks, and these deficits likely reflect vulnerability to schizophrenia. We conducted two experiments to determine whether visual masking procedures can reveal underlying abnormalities in gamma range oscillations in schizophrenia. METHODS: In the first experiment, we conducted nonlinear modeling of visual masking performance data from 89 male schizophrenic patients and 20 male comparison subjects. In the second experiment, electrophysiological recordings of event-related gamma activity were taken during a visual masking task in a subset of eight patients and seven control subjects. RESULTS: In the first experiment, nonlinear modeling of the performance data revealed evidence of oscillations in the gamma range (30 and 35 Hz) for the comparison group but not patients. In the second experiment, the comparison group, but not the patients, showed a burst of gamma range activity 200-400 msec following target presentation. The difference between patients and comparison subjects in this time period was significant (p <.05). CONCLUSIONS: Visual masking procedures can serve as a probe for underlying gamma range activity, which appears to be aberrant in schizophrenia. Perceptual problems in schizophrenia may, at least in part, be due to a failure to establish and/or maintain gamma range oscillations.

Case-Control Studies↗

PubMed2002

Development of a computerized assessment for visual masking.

Visual masking provides a highly informative means of assessing the earliest stages of visual processing. This procedure is frequently used in psychopathology research, most commonly in the study of schizophrenia. Deficits in visual masking tasks appear to reflect vulnerability factors in schizophrenia, as opposed to the symptoms of the illness. Visual masking procedures are typically conducted on a tachistoscope, which limits standardization across sites, as well as the number of variables that can be examined in a testing session. Although visual masking can be administered on a computer, most methods used so far have had poor temporal resolution and yielded a limited range of variables. We describe the development of a computerized visual masking battery. This battery includes a staircase procedure to establish an individual's threshold for target detection, and a relatively dense sampling of masking intervals. It includes both forward and backward masking trials for three different masking conditions that have been used previously in experimental psychopathology (target location, target identification with high-energy mask, and target identification with low-energy mask).

Adult↗