Introduction to Computational Psychiatry: How expectations and perception interact

Date

Jan 29, 2020

Time

3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Speaker

Katharina V. Wellstein

Affiliation

Translational Neuromodeling Unit, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Language

en

Main Topic

Psychologie

Other Topics

Informatik, Medizin, Psychologie

Host

PD Dr. med. habil. Timo Siepmann

Description

Our brain receives a multitude of sensory inputs every second of our lives. As a consequence, our brain has to make decisions on which ones of the sensory inputs are important and which ones it can discard as irrelevant. Thus, our brain has a strong influence on what we perceive.
How do we perceive our world? How can we describe perception using computational modeling? To what extent is this relevant for psychology and psychiatry?
Theories of predictive coding and hierarchical Bayesian inference suggest that our perception is determined by incoming sensory input in conjunction with our prior beliefs.
In this lecture model-based results from a recent study on subclinical persecutory ideation will be discussed. This will allow to describe one computational model (the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter, HGF) in detail.
Very basic mathematical concepts (e.g. Gaussian distributions) underlying the HGF will be encountered and used to create further understanding of the model for people who do not have a mathematical background.
The goal of this lecture is to give everyone an idea of what computational psychiatry is, what computational models can do and what they cannot do.

This event is jointly organised by Medizinische Fakultät Carl Gustav Carus der Technischen Universität Dresden, Fakultät Psychologie der Technischen Universität Dresden and the University Clinics.

Links

• map of location

Last modified: Dec 3, 2019, 9:39:17 AM