Schizophrenia may involve a perceptual distortion characterized by an ontogenetically more primitive mode of perception in which parts of a whole are seen as separate and unrelated. In this study of perceptual distortion among four groups of patients, acute schizophrenic patients were least able to organize perceptual parts into a whole correctly. Chronic and recovered schizophrenic patients did better, although their responses still showed greater fragmentation of percepts than did those of the nonschizophrenic control group.Abstract Teaser