Introduction: Visual Perception, Psychosis, and Computational Psychiatry P Fletcher |
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Brain Mapping Unit, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
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| Introducing this symposium from the perspective of a psychiatrist, I will emphasise the potential value of neuroscientifically-based models of perception in providing the fundamental insights from which to develop our understanding of psychotic illnesses. Such illnesses are characterised by both abnormal perceptions (hallucinations) and beliefs (delusions). Hitherto, there has been a tendency to treat these as separate phenomena and theorists have argued over whether the fundamental problem lies in anomalous perceptions (with normal inference), or faulty inference acting on normal perceptions. Neither explanation has proven satisfactory, and an alternative has been to suggest a need to invoke both disturbed perception and abnormal reasoning in order to explain psychotic symptoms. I would like to highlight the possibility that models of perception discussed in this symposium offer a satisfactory rapprochement in that they dispense with a simple distinction between perception and inference. Rather, they model human perception, learning and belief in terms of hierarchically arranged circuits entailing both feedforward and re-entrant connections at different levels of inference. Such models may offer profound insights into psychopathology, providing a powerful explanatory framework in which a single deficit, operating at multiple levels, may account for the wide range of experiences that characterise the psychotic state. |
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