Delusions of control in schizophrenia: Resistant to the mind's best trick?
Section snippets
The temporal order of intention and action
When we observe someone reaching out for a pencil, we assume that he must have wanted it. When we see someone crying, we infer that she must be sad. When someone helps us without expecting a reward, we are likely to conclude that this person is inherently helpful. For all the actions and behaviors we observe in other people, we infer the existence of corresponding intentions or emotional states which have caused these actions. Influential theories like the self-perception theory (Bem, 1972) and
Delusions of control in schizophrenia
The notion that actions might not be preceded by corresponding intentions bears a striking resemblance to delusions of control, which are frequently reported by patients suffering from schizophrenia (Frith, 2005, Graham et al., 2014). These symptoms, also known as passivity delusions, denote the feeling that one's actions or thoughts are controlled by external forces. In contrast to other symptoms of impaired motor control, such as the alien hand sign, the experience of control delusions does
Temporal back-referral of conscious percepts
In recent years, a great deal of evidence confirmed that the perceived time of sensory events can deviate from their actual occurrence (Bechlivanidis and Lagnado, 2016, Fujisaki et al., 2004, Rohde and Ernst, 2016, Stetson et al., 2006). These perceptual shifts in time highly depend on prior expectations of sensory events and retrospective inferences regarding their causes (Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992, Moore and Haggard, 2008, Voss et al., 2010). Stetson et al. (2006) presented brief light
Perceptual deficits in schizophrenia
The idea that schizophrenic patients – on a basic perceptual level – perceive some aspects of the world more accurately than healthy controls has been confirmed in many studies (Dima et al., 2009, Notredame et al., 2014, Silverstein and Keane, 2011, Tadin et al., 2006, White et al., 2014). In the healthy brain, external stimuli are not directly translated into conscious percepts. Instead, they are preprocessed according to expectations and prior experiences. A large part of the sensory input
Explanatory value and limitations
The previous considerations referred to very basic bodily movements like lifting a finger, but some schizophrenic patients also report the experience of being forced into more complex behaviors. To determine the scope of the proposed model, it is therefore necessary to distinguish between basic bodily movements, which can be initiated and performed almost without cognitive monitoring (e.g., putting forth one's hand to grasp a cup), and complex, sometimes long-lasting behaviors, which involve
Concluding remarks
Schizophrenia is a severe disorder affecting many aspects of cognition. The hypothesis that delusions of control result from a more veridical rather than an impaired perception is in line with many observations of a reduced susceptibility to perceptual illusions (Notredame et al., 2014) and with the finding of a distorted mechanism for illusory perceptual shifts in time (Voss et al., 2010). Furthermore, it is supported by accumulating evidence contradicting the perceived causal relation between
Conflict of interest
The author Martin Riemer declares no conflict of interest.
Role of the funding source
No funding source was involved.
Acknowledgement
No acknowledgements are made.
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