Abstract
Aberrant attention and visual perception have been considered core deficits of schizophrenia. The purpose of this study was to investigate the persistence of global advantage effect and global/local level repetition and switching effects in schizophrenia. Participants were twenty patients with schizophrenia and matched healthy controls and were administered the global-local tasks including repetitions and switching of global/local level. Patients showed more errors on the global level than those on the local level, but there was no difference between both levels in controls. Healthy controls showed reaction time of the local-to-global level switch was shorter than that of the global-to-local levels switch. On the other hand, there was no difference between both switches in patients. These findings suggest an impaired ability to shift the visual attention from local to global processing in patients with schizophrenia.
