Dec 18, 2024 06:32 AM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1068585
INTRO: Could complex beliefs like paranoia have roots in something as basic as vision? A new Yale study finds evidence that they might.
When completing a visual perception task, in which participants had to identify whether one moving dot was chasing another moving dot, those with greater tendencies toward paranoid thinking (believing others intend them harm) and teleological thinking (ascribing excessive meaning and purpose to events) performed worse than their counterparts, the study found. Those individuals more often — and confidently — claimed one dot was chasing the other when it wasn’t.
The findings, published Dec. 17 in the journal Communications Psychology, suggest that, in the future, testing for illnesses like schizophrenia could be done with a simple eye test.
“We’re really interested in how the mind is organized,” said senior author Philip Corlett, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and member of the Wu Tsai Institute. “Chasing or other intentional behaviors are what you might think of as experiences perceived at a very high-level in the brain, that someone might have to reason through and deliberate. In this study, we can see them low down in the brain, in vision, which we think is exciting and interesting — and has implications for how those mechanisms might be relevant for schizophrenia.”
Paranoia and teleological thinking are similar in that they are both misattributions of intention, but paranoia is a negative perception while teleological thinking tends to be positive. Both patterns of thinking are linked to psychosis and schizophrenia.
Hallucinations are associated with psychosis as well and are often about other people, said Corlett, suggesting there may be a social component to these visual misperceptions... (MORE - details)
INTRO: Could complex beliefs like paranoia have roots in something as basic as vision? A new Yale study finds evidence that they might.
When completing a visual perception task, in which participants had to identify whether one moving dot was chasing another moving dot, those with greater tendencies toward paranoid thinking (believing others intend them harm) and teleological thinking (ascribing excessive meaning and purpose to events) performed worse than their counterparts, the study found. Those individuals more often — and confidently — claimed one dot was chasing the other when it wasn’t.
The findings, published Dec. 17 in the journal Communications Psychology, suggest that, in the future, testing for illnesses like schizophrenia could be done with a simple eye test.
“We’re really interested in how the mind is organized,” said senior author Philip Corlett, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and member of the Wu Tsai Institute. “Chasing or other intentional behaviors are what you might think of as experiences perceived at a very high-level in the brain, that someone might have to reason through and deliberate. In this study, we can see them low down in the brain, in vision, which we think is exciting and interesting — and has implications for how those mechanisms might be relevant for schizophrenia.”
Paranoia and teleological thinking are similar in that they are both misattributions of intention, but paranoia is a negative perception while teleological thinking tends to be positive. Both patterns of thinking are linked to psychosis and schizophrenia.
Hallucinations are associated with psychosis as well and are often about other people, said Corlett, suggesting there may be a social component to these visual misperceptions... (MORE - details)