A Shift in Reality: Schizophrenia and Visual processing

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness in which false beliefs and reality are confused by an individual. The illness can affect more than a person's social difficulty; the disorder can cause individual several hardships. On another note, processing visual information is key in allowing organisms to navigate their environment, as it creates conscious awareness for social interaction and personal activities. In patients with schizophrenia, it has been established that impairments in visual processing exist and contribute to symptoms of the disorder. These visual impairments are misperceptions of real, external stimuli in their environment. Individuals with schizophrenia experience visual processing issues (i.e., issues with transduction), such as blurred vision and hypersensitivity. They can additionally experience hallucinations, which can be caused by irregular neurotransmitter flow. This can distort an existing stimulus or cause the perception of an entity that is not even there. The significance of these findings is to highlight possible dysfunction in neural networking regarding the visual processing of schizophrenic patients and to encourage future correlational studies on the topic.