(Mis)perceiving others: toward a second-person science of schizophrenia

Negative symptoms and social difficulties are a source of disability in patients with schizophrenia, yet they are less studied compared to delusions and hallucinations. We draw inspiration from calls to view schizophrenia as a disorder of social interaction, and argue that one way to operationalize such a second-person approach is in terms of the perceptual crossing paradigm. In this paradigm of social haptics, two participants are tasked to find each other’s avatar in an invisible virtual space that also contains other distracting objects. There are no explicit social cues and participants therefore need to learn how to distinguish between different affordances for interaction so as to disambiguate when haptic feedback is in fact mediated social touch. To test the feasibility of this experimental approach, we conducted a small pilot study consisting of seven schizophrenia patients paired with control participants. Both participant groups were able to solve the task, and preliminary findings are largely consistent with the literature on perceptual crossing. We propose hypotheses for future work with this paradigm in the context of social psychiatry, bringing to the fore the possible role of error and uncertainty in social interaction dynamics.