William Koller
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Princeton University
Schizophrenia is characterized by profound departures from consensus models of reality, with symptoms like delusions, disorganization, and perceptual disturbances implying breakdowns in how the mind infers structure from experience. In this talk, I’ll explore how schizophrenia may be connected to disruptions in latent cause inference — the process through which people cluster related observations according to shared, unobservable causes — and describe an ongoing CCNP study measuring this process in individuals with schizophrenia. After providing a methodological overview of three behavioral tasks (a movie-segmentation task, a sentence-reading task, and a “microbes” categorization task), I’ll share preliminary findings suggesting that schizophrenia is associated with disruptions in how people segment latent causes during naturalistic movie viewing.