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. Among the low-level image features, orientation salience was most affected. Furthermore, a general linear model analysis of the data for the four psychiatric disorders revealed a significant effect of disease. This abnormal salience processing depended on the disease and was strongest in patients with schizophrenia, followed by patients with bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and autism spectrum disorder, suggesting a link between abnormalities in salience processing and strength/frequency for psychosis of these disorders.

异常显著性加工已被提议作为精神分裂症患者精神症状的病理生理机制。据报道，精神分裂症患者的注视轨迹在观看图像时异常，这表明异常的视觉显著性是与精神疾病相关的一种可能的病理生理机制。本研究旨在确定精神分裂症个体的视觉显著性是否受到影响，以及这种异常是否是精神分裂症患者所独有的。我们检查了从 7 个研究所招募的 1012 名参与者（分别为 550 名健康个体和 238、41、50 和 133 名患有精神分裂症、双相情感障碍、重度抑郁症和自闭症谱系障碍的个体）的凝视行为，当他们随心所欲地观看静止图像时，即自由观看条件。我们使用了源自低级视觉特征的已建立的显著性图计算模型来测量个体的注视轨迹受视觉显著性指导的程度。分析显示，精神分裂症个体的凝视显著性高于健康个体，这表明患者的凝视更多地受到低水平图像显著性的引导。在低级图像特征中，方向显著性受影响最大。此外，对四种精神疾病数据的一般线性模型分析揭示了疾病的显着影响。 这种异常的显著性处理取决于疾病，在精神分裂症患者中最强，其次是双相情感障碍、重度抑郁症和自闭症谱系障碍患者，表明显著性处理异常与这些疾病精神病的强度/频率之间存在联系。