A patient with a shoplifting addiction, known as thievery, shows eye movements and brain activity responses that are not seen in healthy people to videos and images related to the situation of stealing items at supermarkets, etc., Kyoto University Graduate School of Informatics Research by Associate Professor Koori Goto of the graduate school and Yui Asaoka, a Ph.D.The research group suspects that patients may perceive visual stimuli differently from healthy subjects due to maladaptive learning.
According to Kyoto University, the research group showed 11 thievery patients and 27 healthy subjects videos and images of supermarket interiors, products sold, and unrelated outside scenery, and tracked eye gaze, blinks, and pupils. In addition to examining changes in , we explored activity in the prefrontal cortex region of the brain.
As a result, the thieves' gaze movements, blinking and changes in their movements toward stimulating images and images differed from those of other images and images.There was also a large difference in activity in the prefrontal cortex region between stimulating videos and images and non-stimulating ones.In contrast, no such difference was observed in healthy subjects.
The research group hypothesized that thieves mistakenly learned visual stimuli related to thievery, resulting in them perceiving them in a different way than healthy people. He points out the possibility that the same mechanism is working for kleptomania.
The American Psychiatric Association considers kleptomania to be a mental disorder, but until now there has been little scientific research into its mechanisms.
Paper information:[International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology] Distinct Situational Cue Processing in Individuals with Kleptomania: A Preliminary Study
