Predictive Inference Alterations in Psychosis Proneness Show Task-Dependent Signatures

Area of Science:

• Cognitive neuroscience
• Psychology
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Perception integrates sensory input with prior expectations.
• Altered inference is linked to psychosis.
• Subclinical psychosis-like experiences (PLEs) and their perceptual effects are understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate how PLEs affect sensory evidence weighting and cue reliance.
• Examine task-dependent alterations in perceptual inference across different contexts.
• Determine if psychosis-like traits impact the use of recent experience in perception.

Main Methods:

• Two independent samples of healthy adults (N=142) completed visual detection and motion discrimination tasks.
• Mixed-effects models analyzed the influence of PLE scores on sensory evidence and cue weighting.
• Signal detection analyses assessed perceptual sensitivity and response bias.
• History biases quantified the impact of prior stimuli or choices on current decisions.

Main Results:

• Higher PLE scores correlated with reduced sensory evidence weighting and increased reliance on probabilistic cues.
• Individuals with higher PLEs exhibited reduced perceptual sensitivity and heightened cue-dependent response bias shifts.
• History biases differed: high-PLE individuals showed attenuated repulsive bias in detection but repulsive bias in discrimination.

Conclusions:

• Psychosis-like traits differentially alter the integration of past information in perception.
• Findings suggest a broader inferential vulnerability along the psychosis continuum.
• Task-specific alterations in using recent experience highlight nuanced perceptual changes in PLEs.