Iris Vilares Awarded Grant From the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation
Iris Vilares, faculty, has been awarded $70,000 by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation which is committed to providing grants to support new and innovative research that will ultimately enable people to live happy and productive lives.
Vilares explains that “Recent research has suggested that hallucinations and delusions, core symptoms of schizophrenia, could be caused by an over-reliance on prior information. However, results so far have been mixed, perhaps due to low test-retest reliability of the tasks used. Alternatively, hallucinations and delusions may relate to the weight on prior beliefs differently depending on the type of prior used (low-level perceptual priors or higher-level).
We propose to use a combination of behavioral data, computational modeling, and brain imaging to test these hypotheses and assess the feasibility of using the relative reliance on prior information as a biomarker for hallucinations and delusions.
Results from our project can provide novel neurocomputational insights into the genesis of positive symptoms in schizophrenia, such as hallucinations and delusions, and lay the foundation for the potential use of the relative reliance on prior vs. current information as a biomarker for hallucinations and delusions in Schizophrenia.”
Iris Donga Vilares, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and director of the Decision Making Lab.
Composed by Madison Stromberg, communications assistant.
