Gaze behaviors during free viewing revealed differences in visual salience processing across four major psychiatric disorders: a mega-analysis study of 1012 individuals

Aberrant salience processing has been proposed as a pathophysiological mechanism underlying psychiatric symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. The gaze trajectories of individuals with schizophrenia have been reported to be abnormal when viewing an image, suggesting anomalous visual salience as one possible pathophysiological mechanism associated with psychiatric diseases. This study was designed to determine whether visual salience is affected in individuals with schizophrenia, and whether this abnormality is unique to patients with schizophrenia. We examined the gaze behaviors of 1012 participants recruited from seven institutes (550 healthy individuals and 238, 41, 50 and 133 individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and autism spectrum disorder, respectively) when they looked at stationary images as they liked, i.e., free-viewing condition. We used an established computational model of salience maps derived from low-level visual features to measure the degree to which the gaze trajectories of individuals were guided by visual salience. The analysis revealed that the saliency at the gaze of individuals with schizophrenia were higher than healthy individuals, suggesting that patients' gazes were guided more by low-level image salience. As a result, salience features, orientation and color salience was affected. Furthermore, a general linear model analysis of the data for the four psychiatric disorders revealed a significant effect of disease. This abnormal salience in major depressive disorder, and autism spectrum disorder, followed by patients with bipolar disorder, was the major determinant for psychosis for these disorders.

Kenichiro Miura, Masatoshi Yoshida, Kentaro Morita, Michiko Fujimoto, Yuka Yasuda, Hideanga Yamamori, Junichi Takahashi, Seiko Miyata, Kosuke Okazaki, Junya Matsumoto, Atsuo Toyomaki, Manabu Makino, Naoki Hashimoto, Toshiaki Onitsuka, Kiyoto Kasai, Norio Ozaki, Ryota Hashimoto