Comment by Kevin M. Spencer and Robert W. McCarley
Uhlhaas and colleagues present very interesting findings in their study examining high-frequency inter-areal synchronization during Gestalt perception in schizophrenia. They used an elegant task in which the responses to Gestalt stimuli (“Mooney” faces) were compared to the same stimuli that were inverted or scrambled as a control condition. The motivation for using this kind of task is that it should tap the feature-binding processes that have been proposed to be mediated by high-frequency oscillatory synchronization (e.g., Singer, 1999). The major findings of the study were that in control subjects, Gestalt perception was associated with periods of phase synchronization between electrode sites in the beta (15-30 Hz) frequency band. Schizophrenia patients also showed phase synchrony in the beta band during face perception, but it was reduced in magnitude and delayed in latency with respect to the controls. For schizophrenics, the degree of phase synchrony in the Gestalt condition was positively correlated with...  Read more

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