Individuals with schizophrenia have been shown to be impaired in the attribution of mental states to others. We have demonstrated that they were also impaired in the detection of elementary intentional motions such as chasing. This impairment was situated at the perceptual stage of processing, with abnormal ocular behaviour, but also at the cognitive stage. Using an object translocation paradigm, we found that the same group of patients was also impaired in the attribution of goals and believes to others. This impairment was entirely explained by a lower visual attention dedicated to faces. We have developed ocular measures that showed an attraction of the visual attention of control participants by intentional motion on Frith-Happé animations. Finally, we have shown on other control participants that intentional reasoning from comic strips was associated with a greater visual scanning compared to mechanistic reasoning. These last two paradigms could be particularly useful to confirm that individuals with schizophrenia show an abnormal visual attention toward mentalistic information, as demonstrated in the first two paradigms. The results suggest that visual exploration of mentalistic stimuli could benefit from remediation strategies in schizophrenia.
