Schizophrenia – Failures in Perceptual Updating and Psychosis Severity
In our 9th Fresh Perspectives with Amara Davis, the Loving Mind Institute presents the recently published work entitled “Association Between Failures in Perceptual Updating and the Severity of Psychosis in Schizophrenia”. Amara discusses with Dr. Sonia Bansal an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Maryland Psychiatric Research Center her clinical work with various populations that experience altered sensory perceptions, including hallucinations and delusions. Dr. Bansal has been interested in neuroscience since her undergraduate studies with a specific interest in psychopathology. She continued in her academic training working with veterans diagnosed with schizophrenia, building upon her specialization in cognitive neuroscience. In this interview, Dr. Bansal provides an overview of her work on visual perception and sensory systems and how perceptual updating is affected by psychosis. She further describes how the sensory system affects behavior and how the cognitive system can come into play regarding belief formation by utilizing EEG and psychophysical computer tasks.
Public Interest:
Schizophrenia effects millions of Americans and understanding the neurological mechanisms behind the disease supports researchers’ developing treatments catered to the individual. Specifically developing tools to understand how delusions and hallucinations are implicated in psychosis can aid in treatment.
Innovation in Research:
The ability to use a simple sensory stimulus from computerized prompts to understand more complex information processing allows researchers to assess psychotic symptoms within a clinical setting to understand how symptoms such as paranoia link to the failure to update beliefs.
Key Research Findings:
The use of perceptual stimuli to evaluate the ability to update beliefs using prior experience and form new beliefs allowed the researchers to find that people with psychosis were less likely to update their predictions based on new incoming sensory evidence, but rather placed undue weight on the initial information observed.
To see Amara’s full Interview with Dr. Sonia Bansal on how perceptual updating is affected by psychosis, see the video below or on the LMI YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYbSWM0tris
Bansal S, Bae GY, Robinson BM, Hahn B, Waltz J, Erickson M, Leptourgos P, Corlett P, Luck SJ, Gold JM. Association Between Failures in Perceptual Updating and the Severity of Psychosis in Schizophrenia. JAMA Psychiatry. 2022 Feb 1;79(2):169-177. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34851373/