Neural underpinnings of co-speech gesture perception in schizophrenia: A review

Impaired communication is one of the key features of schizophrenia. Therefore, an investigation of the disease’s nature calls for a better understanding of the neural underpinnings of not only verbal communication but also the lesser-studied non-verbal communication. Spontaneous gestures accompanying oral speech are one of the most important channels for the transmission of non-verbal information. Poor gesture performance in schizophrenia is well documented, but data on the relevant neurophysiological and neuroanatomical aberrations have been obtained only recently. Compared to gesture performance, the perception of gestures provides more opportunities for neurophysiological study, as it does not require a participant’s active movement during measurements or the development of time-consuming expert annotations for each participant’s gestures. At the same time, the brain mechanisms of gesture perception in schizophrenia are understudied. In this review, the existing evidence is analyzed, and future perspectives for studying the brain correlates of spontaneous gesture perception in schizophrenia are discussed. To clarify the context of such studies, we briefly describe data on the brain organization of co-speech gestures, the perception of such gestures in healthy individuals, and the cognitive and social neuroscience methods through which such data may be obtained.