One major distinction between schizophrenia patients and controls is the usage of high-spatial frequency information from the eye regions. Schizophrenia patients did not use high-spatial frequency information from the eyes to identify fearful emotion, whereas this information was critical for controls. When processing fearful faces, healthy individuals tend to activate the amygdala, an effect that is associated with viewing the eye regions, as opposed to other parts of the face.39,40 A previous report that used the Bubbles technique showed that a patient with an amygdala lesion used less of the eye regions at high-spatial frequency when recognizing fear.41 Among schizophrenia patients, studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging found reduced activation associated with processing fearful faces in the amygdala.42,43 Our finding of reduced use of high-spatial frequency information around the eyes may be related to the reduced activation of the amygdala to fear in schizophrenia patients. Patients with autism also show an atypical strategy of using visual information to recognize fearful faces, which is similar to what is seen in schizophrenia patients. In those studies,44,45 autistic patients (as well as their unaffected parents) relied less on the eye areas and more on the mouth areas when judging fear. Furthermore, the parents who used this atypical search strategy to a greater extent were also more likely to be socially aloof, a personality characteristic related to autism.45 Future studies with larger samples will be able to determine whether this aberrant strategy is associated with other characteristics of schizophrenia patients.