Studying the alteration of perception in schizophrenia

Leopoldo Petreanu

Fundación Champalimaud, Portugal

To perceive the world around us, our brain combines the sensory information it receives from sight with previously acquired knowledge. This is how we form a coherent picture of our environment and can make predictions to fill in gaps in the information that reaches our senses.

When this process malfunctions, it can cause us to perceive a reality that does not exist, as happens to some people with neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. Hence the importance of understanding how the brain is able to combine prior knowledge with new information received by the senses and how predictions and expectations influence the world we perceive.

In this project, the researchers will attempt to experimentally bind a visual stimulus to patterns of neural activity in brain areas representing visual information in a mouse model of schizophrenia. They will then compare the results to those of healthy mice in order to identify how internal neural activity influences the brain's response to expected or unexpected stimuli. They will also attempt to determine whether activity in these brain regions can induce activation similar to that caused by sensory stimuli, even in the absence of such stimuli. These experiments will lead to new understanding of the role of expectation in how we perceive the world and of neuropsychiatric diseases themselves.

Circuit mechanisms for associating high-order cortical activity with expected sensory representations in health and desease

€499,976.40