Anomalous perceptions and beliefs are associated with shifts toward different types of prior knowledge in perceptual inference

Davies, Daniel J., Teufel, Christoph ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3915-9716 and Fletcher, Paul C. 2018. Anomalous perceptions and beliefs are associated with shifts toward different types of prior knowledge in perceptual inference. Schizophrenia Bulletin 44 (6) , pp. 1245-1253. 10.1093/schbul/sbx177

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Abstract

Psychotic phenomena manifest in healthy and clinical populations as complex patterns of aberrant perceptions (hallucinations) and tenacious, irrational beliefs (delusions). According to predictive processing accounts, hallucinations and delusions arise from atypicalities in the integration of prior knowledge with incoming sensory information. However, the computational details of these atypicalities and their specific phenomenological manifestations are not well characterised. We tested the hypothesis that hallucination-proneness arises from increased reliance on overly-general application of prior knowledge in perceptual inference, generating percepts that readily capture the gist of the environment but inaccurately render its details. We separately probed the use of prior knowledge to perceive the gist versus the details of ambiguous images in a healthy population with varying degrees of hallucination- and delusion-proneness. We found that the use of prior knowledge varied with psychotic phenomena and their composition in terms of aberrant percepts versus aberrant beliefs. Consistent with previous findings, hallucination-proneness conferred an advantage using prior knowledge to perceive image gist but, contrary to predictions, did not confer disadvantage perceiving image details. Predominant hallucination-proneness actually conferred advantages perceiving both image gist and details, consistent with reliance on highly-detailed perceptual knowledge. Delusion-proneness, and especially predominance of delusion-proneness over hallucination-proneness, conferred disadvantage perceiving image details but not image gist, though evidence of specific impairment of detail perception was preliminary. We suggest this is consistent with reliance on abstract, belief-like knowledge. We posit that phenomenological variability in psychotic experiences may be driven by variability in the type of knowledge observers rely upon to resolve perceptual ambiguity.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0586-7614
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 December 2017
Date of Acceptance:	14 November 2017
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 19:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/106526

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