Loopy inference in schizophrenia S Deneve1, R Jardri2 |
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1Group for Neural Theory, Ecole Normale Supérieure, France |
| Recent molecular and computational studies support the role of inhibition in stabilizing the information flow in complex recurrent networks. Moreover, subtle impairments of excitatory-to-inhibitory (E/I) balance or regulation appear to be involved in many neurological and psychiatric conditions. The current study aims to specifically and quantitatively relate impaired inhibition with psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia. Considering that the brain constructs hierarchical causal models of the external world, we show how a selective dysfunction of inhibitory loops can result in not only hallucinations but also the formation and subsequent consolidation of delusional beliefs. An impairment in inhibition results in a pathological form of inference called "Loopy Belief Propagation", in which bottom-up and top-down messages are reverberated and accounted for multiple times. Loopy belief propagation accounts for the emergence of erroneous percepts, the patient’s overconfidence when facing probabilistic choices, the learning of “unshakable” causal relationships between unrelated events and the paradoxical immunity to perceptual illusions, which are all known to be associated with schizophrenia. |
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