Sofia Guzzoni

Schizophrenia is an acute mental illness that is characterized in part by visual, as well as auditory hallucinations, which can be extremely debilitating to the individual depending on the severity of the diagnosis. Schizophrenia’s symptoms are categorized into two main types. The first are positive symptoms, which include hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking. The second is negative symptoms, which involve diminished emotional expression, social withdrawal, and a lack of motivation or pleasure in everyday activities. This illness affects approximately 24 million individuals worldwide, and 2.8 million adults in the United States. 

While these hallucinations have been vastly studied in patients with schizophrenia, there is a knowledge gap regarding the underlying perceptual processes that are less understood, especially how these processes differ from those in healthy individuals. For example, visual and auditory pathways are crucial for accurate emotion recognition in healthy development. These skills are essential for social interaction and are typically robust by adolescence. Past research has shown that deficits in auditory emotion recognition, and facial emotion perception are both core features of schizophrenia, as well as key components of social cognitive impairment. These deficits in emotion recognition could also be translated to poor ability to recognize tonal or prosodic features of speech that convey emotion. This would include changes in base pitch and pitch variability. 

To understand this issue, I studied how visual and auditory processes develop in healthy children and adolescents, and this became the baseline that helped me understand the differences between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Furthermore, this helped me understand how visual and auditory pathways develop in patients with schizophrenia and differ from healthy development, leading to hallucinations or psychosis later on in development.