Signal discrimination in the psychotic phenotype: increased sensory precision and reduced decision threshold associated with psychotic-like experiences.
Cognitive neuropsychiatry July 1, 2025 Francesco Scaramozzino, Ryan Mckay, Nicholas Furl 1 citation
Psychotic-like experiences are linked to overprecise signal discrimination and lower decision thresholds, which may bias perceptual inference toward false positive detections. In 191 participants completing a Random Dot Motion task, drift-diffusion models showed that hallucination- and delusion-like experiences were associated with increased drift rates, a measure of sensory precision. Hallucination-like experiences also predicted lower decision thresholds. On the beads task, psychotic-like experiences correlated with higher confidence ratings but not with reduced data-gathering. These findings suggest that overprecise signal discrimination and lower decision thresholds may contribute to anomalous experiences.