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FB Kolloq WiSe2026/27: Elisabeth Sterner

„Computational signatures of cognitive impairments in the psychosis spetrum”

Veranstaltungsdaten

Elisabeth Sterner, Technische Universität München
„Computational signatures of cognitive impairments in the psychosis spetrum”

Cognitive symptoms are a robust feature of psychosis, however the mechanisms underlying these alterations remain poorly understood. By applying computational approaches across distinct cognitive domains and stages of illness, this talk aims to show how formal models can help identify the processes contributing to cognitive alterations in the psychosis spectrum.

In the first part of this talk, I will present an active inference approach to investigating decision-making in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis, patients with first-episode psychosis, and healthy controls. In the second part, I will focus on language processing, presenting two studies that combine Bayesian belief updating models with neuroimaging methods to investigate how altered weighting of prior expectations and sensory evidence may contribute to alterations in language comprehension. The first study uses EEG to examine changes in semantic prediction error processing associated with psychotic-like experiences. The second study applies MRS-spectroscopy and FDOPA PET in an ongoing longitudinal study of patients with chronic schizophrenia to investigate how glutamatergic and dopaminergic function relate to changes in predictive language processing during active psychosis and remission.