ArticleSchizophrenia research2022
Everything is connected: Inference and attractors in delusions.
Article in Schizophrenia research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The neurobiology of functional neurological disorders characterised by impaired awareness.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- A Dual Prediction Error Populations Model of Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: Bridging NMDA Hypofunction and Gain Hyperfunction.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Article
- Conative inference as a mechanism of allostatic resilience: wanting to be and being to want.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- The role of affective states in computational psychiatry.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Review
- The association between racism and psychosis: An umbrella review.PLOS mental health · 2025Article
- Article
- Active Inference in Psychology and Psychiatry: Progress to Date?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- The Many Roles of Precision in Action.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- EEG spectral attractors identify a geometric core of brain dynamics.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- A new predictive coding model for a more comprehensive account of delusions.The lancet. Psychiatry · 2024Review
- Evidence for Reduced Sensory Precision and Increased Reliance on Priors in Hallucination-Prone Individuals in a General Population Sample.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2024Article
- Altered Perception of Environmental Volatility During Social Learning in Emerging Psychosis.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- (Mal)adaptive Mentalizing in the Cognitive Hierarchy, and Its Link to Paranoia.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Are we really Bayesian? Probabilistic inference shows sub-optimal knowledge transfer.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- D2/D3 dopamine supports the precision of mental state inferences and self-relevance of joint social outcomes.Nature. Mental health · 2024Article
- Resolving the Delusion Paradox.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2023Review
- Blocking D2/D3 dopamine receptors in male participants increases volatility of beliefs when learning to trust others.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Cognitive effort and active inference.Neuropsychologia · 2023Article
- The role of the salience network in cognitive and affective deficits.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Review
- Flexible intentions: An Active Inference theory.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Delusions are, by popular definition, false beliefs that are held with certainty and resistant to contradictory evidence. They seem at odds with the notion that the brain at least approximates Bayesian inference. This is especially the case in schizophrenia, a disorder thought to relate to decreased - rather than increased - certainty in the brain's model of the world. We use an active inference Markov decision process model (a Bayes-optimal decision-making agent) to perform a simple task involving social and non-social inferences. We show that even moderate changes in some model parameters - decreasing confidence in sensory input and increasing confidence in states implied by its own (especially habitual) actions - can lead to delusions as defined above. Incorporating affect in the model increases delusions, specifically in the social domain. The model also reproduces some classic psychological effects, including choice-induced preference change, and an optimism bias in inferences about oneself. A key observation is that no change in a single parameter is both necessary and sufficient for delusions; rather, delusions arise due to conditional dependencies that create 'basins of attraction' which trap Bayesian beliefs. Simulating the effects of antidopaminergic antipsychotics - by reducing the model's confidence in its actions - demonstrates that the model can escape from these attractors, through this synthetic pharmacotherapy.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.