The collinear flanker facilitation effects in individuals with psychoticism and creative traits C-C Wu1, C-C Chen2, Y-L Shih1, W-L Lin1 |
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1Department of Psychology, Fo Guang University, Taiwan |
| Individuals of schizophrenia spectrum show a deficit in perceptual organization. To understand the mechanisms underlying such deficit, we measured the collinear flanker effect on contrast discrimination in 26 observers with various degrees of psychoticism. Each observer was assessed by Eysenck Personality Questionnaire for psychoticism and Creativity Personality Scale for creative traits. The latter was to test the relationship between creativity and psychoticism. The task of the observers was to detect a 4 cyc/deg vertical Gabor target superimposed on a Gabor pedestal. We measured the target-threshold vs. pedestal-contrast (TvC) functions with or without the presence of collinear flankers. For all observers, the presence of the flankers decreased target threshold at low pedestal contrasts, but increased it at high contrasts. Compared with the control group, the high-psychoticism/low-creativity individuals showed a larger flanker effect at low contrast but a smaller effect at high contrasts. The high-psychoticism/high-creativity individuals showed an opposite trend. The individual difference in the data was well fit by a contrast normalization model by varying both excitatory and inhibitory sensitivities to the flankers but not the sensitivities to the pedestal or target. Contrasts with previous studies, our result suggests different mechanisms for psychoticism and creative traits. |
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