People with stronger tendencies toward hallucinations and delusions are more likely to perceive faces in visual noise and to detect invisible direct gaze, supporting the theory that psychosis involves overweighing high-level prior expectations over sensory evidence. In 39 healthy individuals varying in psychosis proneness, the tendency to see faces in noise correlated with hallucination proneness (r = 0.50) and delusion proneness (r = 0.46). The tendency to detect invisible direct gaze also correlated with hallucination proneness (r = 0.43) but not conclusively with delusion proneness. These findings suggest that overly strong priors for socially meaningful stimuli may represent an early processing alteration in psychosis.
Inferior frontal cortex plays a causal role in resolving perceptual ambiguities, thereby determining what is consciously experienced. Computational modeling and two fMRI experiments showed that this region detects conflicts caused by ambiguous sensory information. Disrupting inferior frontal cortex activity with transcranial magnetic stimulation slowed the updating of conscious experience in response to such conflicts. These findings indicate that prefrontal cortex is not merely involved in introspection or action but actively contributes to shaping the contents of consciousness.