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

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