Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
J Neurosci. 2013 Aug 21;33(34):13701-12. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1778-13.2013.
Delusions are unfounded yet tenacious beliefs and a symptom of psychotic disorder. Varying degrees of delusional ideation are also found in the healthy population. Here, we empirically validated a neurocognitive model that explains both the formation and the persistence of delusional beliefs in terms of altered perceptual inference. In a combined behavioral and functional neuroimaging study in healthy participants, we used ambiguous visual stimulation to probe the relationship between delusion-proneness and the effect of learned predictions on perception. Delusional ideation was associated with less perceptual stability, but a stronger belief-induced bias on perception, paralleled by enhanced functional connectivity between frontal areas that encoded beliefs and sensory areas that encoded perception. These findings suggest that weakened lower-level predictions that result in perceptual instability are implicated in the emergence of delusional beliefs. In contrast, stronger higher-level predictions that sculpt perception into conformity with beliefs might contribute to the tenacious persistence of delusional beliefs.
妄想是没有根据的但却固执的信念，是精神错乱的一种症状。在健康人群中也存在不同程度的妄想观念。在这里，我们通过实证验证了一个神经认知模型，该模型根据改变的知觉推断解释了妄想信念的形成和持续。在一项结合行为和功能神经影像学的健康参与者研究中，我们使用模糊的视觉刺激来探测易患妄想倾向与所学预测对感知的影响之间的关系。妄想观念与感知稳定性降低有关，但对感知的信念诱导偏差更强，与编码信念的额叶区域和编码感知的感觉区域之间的功能连接增强相平行。这些发现表明，导致感知不稳定的较弱的低级预测与妄想信念的出现有关。相比之下，更强的高级预测将感知塑造为与信念一致，可能有助于妄想信念的顽强持续。
