Perceptual Dysregulation in Psychiatric Nosology

This book highlights the relevance of perceptual processing to symptom formation across psychiatric disorders, written by experts in perceptual inference from the fields of human and animal sensory neurobiology. A broad range of topics is covered, beginning with an emphasis on formal computational models that quantify how organisms from rodents to humans encode and update neural representations of external and internal states. Subsequent chapters illustrate how abnormalities in these processes and their corresponding neural circuits have been linked to the development of a range of exteroceptive and interoceptive forms of psychopathology. This includes evidence that inappropriate updating and an overweighting of expectations correspond to severity of delusions and hallucinations, respectively, as well as evidence that anxiety results from erroneous interoceptive inferences whereby physiological inputs maladaptively influence beliefs about affect and arousal. Because inferential abnormalities and their resulting symptoms cut across diagnoses, an understanding of psychopathology rooted in these factors would inherently transcend diagnostic boundaries. Because they are grounded in an understanding of sensory and perceptual neurocircuitry that has been well-delineated over the past 50 years, these models may more deeply inform the biological basis of symptom generation, maintenance, and resolution. Lastly, the book uses these insights to propose new tools and interventions rooted in formal neural process models for inference that can be tested in both clinical and preclinical studies. By emphasizing commonalities and differences in various aspects of perceptual inference, this work informs the construction of a psychiatric nosology based more explicitly on formal models of neurophysiology.

The chapter by Joost Haarsma and Peter Kok is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.