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Methods

One hundred healthy participants (53 female) underwent a well-established psychophysics force discrimination task to quantify how they perceived self-generated and externally generated touch. The perceived intensity of tactile stimuli delivered to their left index finger (magnitude) and the ability to discriminate the stimuli (precision) were measured. Afterwards, participants completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ)

Results

A significant negative correlation was found between somatosensory attenuation and the Cognitive-Perceptual SPQ factor (rho=− 0.259, p= 0.009), which was also associated with a reduced sensitivity for discriminating self-generated touches (rho= 0.339, p< 0.001). These effects were specific to positive schizotypy and were not observed for the negative or disorganized dimensions of schizotypy, both when treating schizotypy as a continuous and categorical variable …