I was basically reading about Negative Priming on wikipedia (acknowledged not the best source of academia) and apparently schizotypes have less negative priming than normal folks. This led me to think about how reduced negative priming could play into the symptoms of schizophrenia.

Basically it's not just perceptual, it's also verbal and cognitive. Hence our minds over process unnecessary data. The negative priming issue may explain why hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia are there. If there is too much dopamine, the schizotype cannot experience pleasure from events that normally cause dopamine release because the amount of dopamine released during a pleasurable event is comparatively less than what's already going on. This leads to anhedonia.

However, this could also be the cause of reduced negative priming, because it's less likely that such a small amount of dopamine released while focusing on a single data item will cause regard of that data item as novel. Hence reduced negative priming.

This comes into play with magic eye posters as these posters basically rely on negative priming to function. Normally one defocuses (visually and cognitively) on the static pattern and and sees only a novel item, in this case tricking the brain into seeing a picture. However, with schizotypes there is reduced negative priming, so if this is all accurate it would stand to reason that schizotypes would have a much more difficult time seeing the novel item (picture) in magic eye posters, because they're brain doesn't defocus from the original pattern.

Anecdotally I was impressed that it is suspected that reduced negative priming is the biological advantage to schizotypy that keeps it in the gene pool. Basically schizotypes are better at perceiving big picture patterns in data because they don't ignore non-novel data items as quickly (basically don't ignore unimportant facts). This also leads to obvious trouble.

I didn't want to state any of this at first because I wanted to avoid a confirmation bias in this poll. Although I think it hardly matters with as few responses. Plus I would have to set up an equally large control group to see how non-schizotypes answer the same questions.

Anyways, food for thought, in case anyone was lacking. I may be completely off on my facts here, I'm not an academic. I'm looking forward to seeing people's responses to this.