BACKGROUND Faces convey valuable daily life social signals. As in most psychiatric conditions, non-verbal social cognition or its components including face processing may be aberrant in schizophrenia (SZ). Social participation of individuals with SZ is vital for their quality of life, and remediation of social abilities in this population is of high relevance both for society and clinical care. METHOD Tuning to faces in non-face images such as shadows, grilled toasts, or ink blots is called face pareidolia. Humans possess high sensitivity to facial signals: even fetuses and infants are well tuned to coarse face cues. Here we assessed face tuning in individuals with SZ and person-by-person matched controls by using a new experimental tool, a set of food-plate images bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style. The key benefit of these images is that single components do not trigger face processing. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS The outcome indicates that individuals with SZ exhibit aberrant face tuning in face-like non-face images (χ2(1) = 17.44, p = 0.0001) that can hamper adaptive interaction with peers and social participation hindering, in turn, clinical remediation. Face response rate in SZ patients was related to the scores on the event arrangement task tapping social cognition (Pearson product-moment correlation, r = 0.602, p = 0.01) and on picture completion task assessing visual perceptual organization (Spearman's rho = 0.614, p = 0.009). Therefore, poor performance on the face tuning task is unlikely to be accounted for by deviant general cognitive abilities, but rather by impairments in perceptual integration and social cognition. Comparison of these findings with data in autism and other neuropsychiatric conditions provides novel insights on the origins of face tuning in SZ and triggers brain imaging research.

中文翻译：

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精神分裂症患者的面部幻觉

背景技术面部传达有价值的日常生活社交信号。与大多数精神疾病一样，精神分裂症 (SZ) 的非语言社会认知或其组成部分（包括面部处理）可能异常。SZ 患者的社会参与对其生活质量至关重要，而改善该人群的社交能力对社会和临床护理都具有高度相关性。方法 对非人脸图像（如阴影、烤面包或墨渍）中的人脸进行调整被称为面部幻觉。人类对面部信号具有高度敏感性：即使是胎儿和婴儿也能很好地适应粗糙的面部信号。在这里，我们通过使用一种新的实验工具，一组与 Giuseppe Arcimboldo 风格接壤的食物盘图像，评估了患有 SZ 的个体和逐人匹配控制的个体的面部调整。这些图像的主要好处是单个组件不会触发人脸处理。结果与结论 结果表明，患有 SZ 的个体在类似面部的非面部图像中表现出异常的面部调整（χ2(1) = 17.44，p = 0.0001），这会妨碍与同龄人和社会参与的适应性互动，进而阻碍临床补救。SZ 患者的面部反应率与事件安排任务挖掘社会认知（Pearson 积-矩相关性，r = 0.602，p = 0.01）和评估视觉感知组织的图片完成任务（Spearman's rho = 0.614，p = 0.009）。因此，面部调整任务的糟糕表现不太可能是由异常的一般认知能力造成的，而是由感知整合和社会认知的障碍造成的。