Unlike bipolar patients without psychosis, bipolar disorder patients with psychosis tends to show similar EEG responses (particularly P50) to schizophrenia. ( 6) found that the neural similarities in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder depends on severity of psychosis in bipolar disorder.

For example, one study reported that genes underlying dopamine function in the prefrontal cortex are similarly implicated in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder ( 5). Studies have shown that patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia show both similar and dissimilar neural abnormalities. As we discuss below, both disorders show both similar and dissimilar kinds of perceptual, cognitive, and neural patterns. Bipolar disorder (BPD) is a mood disorder characterized by alternating states of depression and mania or hypomania ( 1). Positive symptoms involve delusions and hallucinations, while negative symptoms include avolition and diminished emotional expression. Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by positive and negative symptoms ( 1). Our findings are agreement with prior findings on more impaired cognitive processes in schizophrenia than in bipolar patients. Our results show that schizophrenia patients scored higher on pareidolia measures than both healthy controls and patients with bipolar disorder. The responses were scored by two independent raters with an excellent congruence (kappa > 0.9).

Further, we also calculated the total pareidolia score for each task (the sum number of images with illusory responses in the scene and noise tests).

Illusory responses were defined as answers when observers falsely identified objects that were not on the images in the scene task (maximum illusory score: 10), and the number of noise images in which they reported the presence of a face (maximum illusory score: 32). We have used (a) the scene test, which consists of 10 blurred images of natural scenes that was previously found to produce illusory face responses and (b) the noise test which had 32 black and white images consisting of visual noise and 8 images depicting human faces participants indicated whether a face was present on these images and to point to the location where they saw the face. Accordingly, in this study, we, for the first time, measured pareidolia in patients with bipolar disorder ( N = 50), and compared that to patients with schizophrenia ( N = 50) and healthy controls ( N = 50). While there are many studies on pareidolia in healthy individuals and patients with schizophrenia, to our knowledge, there are no prior studies on pareidolia in patients with bipolar disorder.

Auditory illusions cause