Events
Are Schizophrenia and Autism Disorders of Prediction?
Wednesday 20 November 13:00 until 14:00
Pevensey 1 - Room 1A6
Speaker: Dr Peggy Seriès (University of Edinburgh, Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychiatry)
Part of the series: Leverhulme Seminar Series
Are Schizophrenia and Autism Disorders of Prediction?
A growing idea in computational neuroscience is that perception and cognition can be successfully described in terms of predictive processing or Bayesian inference: the nervous system would maintain and update internal probabilistic models that serve to interpret the world and guide our actions. This approach is increasingly recognised to also be of interest to Psychiatry. Mental illness could correspond to the brain trying to interpret the world through distorted internal models, or incorrectly combining such internal models with sensory information. These ideas have become dominant in trying to understand autism and schizophrenia in particular.
I will describe work pursued in my lab that aims at uncovering such internal models, using behavioural experiments and computational methods.
In health, we are particularly interested in clarifying how prior beliefs affect perception and decision-making, how long they take to build up or be unlearned, how complex they can be, and how they can inform us on the type of computations and learning that the brain performs. In mental illness, we are interested in understanding whether/how the machinery of probabilistic inference could be impaired, and/or relies on the use of distorted priors.
I will introduce the emerging field of Computational Psychiatry and describe recent results relevant to the study of schizophrenia and autism where we directly and quantitatively test the current theories according to which perceptual inference, perceptual priors integration or the relative precision of priors vs likelihood would differ in these disorders, as compared to controls.
By: Joshua Hargreaves
Last updated: Saturday, 16 November 2019