Psychotic Experiences in Schizophrenia and Sensitivity to Sensory Evidence

Perceptual inference depends on an optimal integration of current sensory evidence with prior beliefs about the environment. Alterations of this process have been related to the emergence of positive symptoms in schizophrenia. However, it has remained unclear whether delusions and hallucinations arise from an increased or decreased weighting of prior beliefs relative to sensory evidence. To investigate the relation of this prior-to-likelihood ratio to positive symptoms in schizophrenia, we devised a novel experimental paradigm which gradually manipulates perceptually ambiguous visual stimuli by disambiguating stimulus information. As a proxy for likelihood precision, we assessed the sensitivity of individual participants to sensory evidence. As a surrogate for the precision of prior beliefs in perceptual stability, we measured phase duration in ambiguity. Relative to healthy controls, patients with schizophrenia showed a stronger increment in congruent perceptual states for increasing levels of disambiguating stimulus evidence. Sensitivity to sensory evidence correlated positively with the individual patients’ severity of perceptual anomalies and hallucinations. Moreover, the severity of such experiences correlated negatively with phase duration. Our results indicate that perceptual anomalies and hallucinations are associated with a shift of perceptual inference toward sensory evidence and away from prior beliefs. This reduced prior-to-likelihood ratio in sensory processing may contribute to the phenomenon of aberrant salience, which has been suggested to give rise to the false inferences underlying psychotic experiences.