Overly Strong Priors for Socially Meaningful Visual Signals Are Linked to Psychosis Proneness in Healthy Individuals

Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

According to the predictive coding theory of psychosis, hallucinations and delusions are explained by an overweighing of high-level prior expectations relative to sensory information that leads to false perceptions of meaningful signals. However, it is currently unclear whether the hypothesized overweighing of priors represents a pervasive alteration that extends to the visual modality and takes already effect at early automatic processing stages. Here, we addressed these questions by studying visual perception of socially meaningful stimuli in healthy individuals with varying degrees of psychosis proneness. In a first task, we quantified participants’ prior for detecting faces in visual noise using a Bayesian decision model. In a second task, we measured participants’ prior for detecting direct gaze stimuli that were rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression. We found that the prior for detecting faces in noise correlated with hallucination proneness as well as delusion proneness. The prior for detecting invisible direct gaze was significantly associated with hallucination proneness but not conclusively with delusion proneness. Our results provide evidence for the idea that overly strong high-level priors for automatically detecting socially meaningful stimuli might constitute a processing alteration in psychosis.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Uncommon priors require origin disputes.Robin Hanson - 2006 - Theory and Decision 61 (4):319-328.
Description and the Problem of Priors.Jeffrey A. Barrett - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (6):1343-1353.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-04-09

Downloads
3 (#1,519,925)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?