Description:

Join us for our next colloquium event with Dr. Philip Corlett! There will be a reception after the event.

Title: Translational Models for Psychosis Research 

Abstract: Computational approaches to explaining the symptoms of psychiatric illnesses are undergoing a renaissance. This talk will describe the development of computational approaches to psychotic symptoms through a series of phases: from conceptual, to empirical, and quantitative. The strengths of the approach include the ability to connect levels of explanation – from epidemiological data down to circuit neuroscience. The work suggests that delusions are aberrant beliefs driven by inappropriate prediction errors and hallucinations are errant percepts driven by overweighted prior beliefs. In order to unite these two symptom categories theorists and empiricists have begun to examine volatility processing. When the world is perceived to be changing unpredictably an organism is faced with two possibilities – learn quickly to pre-empt the changes or ignore that signals that change is afoot. These two strategies may underwrite delusions and hallucinations respectively and each may be implemented in independent neural circuits, each responding to aberrant signals of volatility. Furthermore, the social content of delusions and hallucinations demands explanation. Computational psychiatrists appeal either to a domain specific problem with social cognition or a domain general issue with inference. Future work in computational psychiatry, building upon the progress already made, will continue to refine the hypothesis space, ideally leading to a deeper understanding and better treatments for psychosis.