Shift toward prior knowledge confers a perceptual advantage in early psychosis and psychosis-prone healthy individuals

Significance Perceiving things that are not there and holding unfounded, bizarre beliefs (hallucinations and delusions, respectively) are psychotic symptoms that occur in particular syndromes including affective psychoses, paranoid states, and schizophrenia. We studied the emergence of this loss of contact with reality based on current models of normal brain function. Working with clinical individuals experiencing early psychosis and nonclinical individuals with high levels of psychosis proneness, we show that their visual perception is characterized by a shift that favors prior knowledge over incoming sensory evidence. Given that these alterations in information processing are evident early on in psychosis and even in association with subtle perceptual changes indicating psychosis proneness, they may be important factors contributing to the emergence of severe mental illnesses.