Summary: A new study suggests complex beliefs like paranoia may have roots in visual misperception. Participants prone to paranoia or teleological thinking were more likely to wrongly identify one moving dot as chasing another in a visual task.
Paranoia and teleological thinking differ in their errors, suggesting distinct cognitive patterns. The findings point to potential future diagnostic tools, like eye tests, for psychosis and schizophrenia, highlighting the role of vision in mental health.
Key Facts:
- Visual Perception and Belief: Paranoid individuals more often misinterpreted dots as chasing each other in a visual task.
- Cognitive Patterns: Paranoia affected identifying the chased dot, while teleological thinking impacted recognizing the chaser.
- Potential Diagnostic Tool: Simple perceptual tasks could one day assess psychosis risk.
Source: Yale
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.
“So we wondered whether there might be something related to social perception — or misperception, what we refer to as social hallucination — that we could measure and that relate to these symptoms of psychosis,” he said.
For the task, participants were shown dots moving on a screen. Sometimes one dot was chasing another; other times there was no chase. Across different trials of the task, participants had to say whether a chase was occurring or not.
Those with higher degrees of paranoia and teleological thinking (as measured through questionnaires) were more likely than others to say with confidence that a chase was happening when one wasn’t. Essentially, they perceived a social interaction that wasn’t occurring.
In additional experiments, the researchers asked participants to identify which dot was doing the chasing and which dot was being chased. In these results, paranoia and teleological thinking began to diverge.
“People with paranoia were particularly bad at detecting which dot was being chased,” said Santiago Castiello, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in Corlett’s lab.
“And people with high teleology were particularly bad at detecting which dot was doing the chasing.”
That these two types of beliefs differed in this way highlights that they are distinct and may have implications for diagnosis or treatment, said the researchers. The connection to vision may also shift thinking around how the brain gives rise to psychotic symptoms.
“Very few people with congenital blindness develop schizophrenia,” said Castiello.
“Finding these social hallucinations in vision makes me wonder if schizophrenia is something that develops through errors in how people sample the visual world.”
While there are no immediate therapeutic implications from these findings, deeper understanding of these beliefs could aid in pharmacological treatment development and risk assessment.
“One thing we’re thinking about now is whether we can find eye tests that predict someone’s risk for psychosis,” said Corlett.
“Maybe there is some very quick perceptual task that can identify when someone might need to talk to a clinician.”
About this paranoia and visual neuroscience research news
Author: Bess Connolly
Source: Yale
Contact: Bess Connolly – Yale
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Paranoid and teleological thinking give rise to distinct social hallucinations in vision” by Philip Corlett et al. Communications Psychology
Abstract
Paranoid and teleological thinking give rise to distinct social hallucinations in vision
Paranoia (believing others intend harm) and excess teleological thinking (ascribing too much purpose) are non-consensual beliefs about agents. Human vision rapidly detects agents and their intentions.
Might paranoia and teleology have roots in visual perception?
Using displays that evoke the impression that one disc (‘wolf’) is chasing another (‘sheep’), we find that paranoia and teleology involve perceiving chasing when there is none (studies 1 and 2) — errors we characterize as social hallucinations.
When asked to identify the wolf or the sheep (studies 3, 4a, and 4b), we find high-paranoia participants struggled to identify sheep, while high-teleology participants were impaired at identifying wolves — both despite high-confidence. Both types of errors correlated with hallucinatory percepts in the real world.
Although paranoia and teleology both involve excess perception of agency, the current results collectively suggest a perceptual distinction between the two, perhaps with clinical import.
