Event:

Abstract:
Emerging evidence suggests that hallucinations may arise because of an over-reliance on prior knowledge during perception. While best established in psychosis-spectrum disorders data also support the presence of this abnormality in other hallucination-prone neuropsychiatric illnesses that vary in their degree of sensory circuit disruption. In this talk we ask whether an over-weighting of expectations may reflect a compensatory response to degraded incoming sensory information. We make the case that visual hallucinogenesis across a wide array of neuropsychiatric disorders can be captured within a common Bayesian computational framework as a compensatory response to sensory signal disruptions at different levels of the visual processing hierarchy. We focus on three disorders with prominent visual hallucinations – Charles Bonnet syndrome dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) and psychosis – and highlight the fact that these conditions describe a spectrum of visual impairment in which the overtness and localization of the processing disruption is reflected in the characteristics of the emergent visual hallucinations. We then test this framework empirically by studying the earliest manifestations of hallucinations in early-stage DLB and the clinical high-risk syndrome for psychosis using psychophysics functional neuroimaging connectome-based predictive modeling and virtual lesioning analyses. Taken together our work offers a unifying account of how sensory disruptions interact with other aspects of cognitive and neural architecture to produce hallucinations across neuropsychiatric disease. We hope this framework will aid efforts to identify pathophysiologically distinct patient subgroups and support the development of targeted pharmacological and circuit-based interventions.

Join the Research Seminar online:
Link: https://bbb.tum.de/rooms/sh4-fn5-pov-f3e/join


We are looking forward to a great discussion.
See full program: https://franziskaknolle.com/journal-club-tumnic/