The Personal Journey

Like many other immigrant students, I navigated challenges such as securing scholarships, managing personal relationships, missing my beloved family far away, maintaining work-life balance, facing an uncertain future, and obtaining a visa—all in a language that was not my first. The good news? With time, patience, and hard work, these challenges found resolution. This work reflects a collective achievement during my transition from graduate student to postdoctoral researcher.

This publication is my first paper as a postdoc with Phil Corlett. In 2021 as a doctoral student in the UK, I received the Experimental Psychology Society’s Study Visit award. Though the COVID-19 pandemic caused delays—I was one week from even losing the award—, I finally visited Yale’s Belief Lab in March 2022. Phil and I discovered shared interests in the cognitive mechanisms underlying psychotic experience. After a productive 3-months visit, during which we conducted a study based on Benjamin van Buren’s work¹, Phil invited me to return as a postdoc after my doctorate.

Around the same time, Joan Ongchoco, a graduate student in Brian J. Scholl’s group, joined Phil’s lab as a postdoc. We discovered that people with elevated teleological thinking and a tendency towards delusions exhibited similar behaviours in computerized learning tasks². Intrigued by the perceptual parallels between paranoia and teleology, we initiated new studies measuring both traits. This marked the beginning of our collaboration.

The Research

We all have the capacity to perceive things that others do not. For instance, I have entered a restaurant and had the feeling other customers were talking about me, even though they were strangers. I quickly realized they barely noticed me and my first impression was wrong. These feelings vary in strength. Some people think that the cyclists passing by them work for the CIA and are paying them special attention, maybe even following them. These are examples of distinct levels of paranoia, and these believes may be prevalent in general population as well as in people with psychiatric conditions. In parallel people also ascribe purpose to seemingly meaningless events. For example, one may believe that there is a deeper importance in randomly losing WiFi connection right before sending an important email. This ascription of deeper meaning to events is a form of teleological thinking, believing that: “everything happens for a reason”.

Paranoia and teleology seem to be the purview of high-level reasoning, since they involve thinking about other agents and causal forces, how they might influence our lives. However, recently we have shown that teleological and paranoid beliefs can be explained in simpler associative learning terms, without appealing to deliberate reasoning². Our data suggested that prediction errors (discrepancies between expectations and reality) driving errant associations between causes and effects may be responsible for the formation of these seemingly high-level beliefs.

Paranoia and teleology are also concerns about agents and agency. They might involve social cognition. In particular they might engage Theory-of-Mind, the ability of people to reason and make inferences about the mind of others. For example, paranoia has been suggested to arise from difficulties in reasoning about others’ mental states and using that information to form beliefs about their intentions, reputations, and the degree of coalitional threat they pose³. This seems quite deliberative.

But might the people who entertain these beliefs also actually see the world differently in the first place? If so, might these different beliefs about the world (and the people in it) have unique correlates in the participants perceptual impressions? To what extent do these ‘high’ level reasoning phenomena involve ‘low’ level perception?

To answer these questions, we ran five online studies using a perceiving animacy task (see video) where people were exposed to displays that exhibit a chase (second display) and the absence of a chase (first display). These chasing displays have been studied thoroughly in vison science¹. They allowed us to quantify the degree to which people perceive animacy, for example when one disc chases another. Even with six distractor discs, the visual system quickly detects chasing. People discriminate relatively well between displays with and without chases. We chose these displays instead of other classical social displays⁴ because we wanted to focus on percepts relevant for paranoia, such as perceived threat.

We measured paranoia and teleological thinking with validated self-report questionnaires^5,6. In the first two studies, we found that participants with paranoia and teleological thinking were more likely to report they saw a chase when there was none. In the next studies we asked participants to identify the pursuer disk (wolf) and the disc being pursued (sheep), also they reported how confident they were. In these studies, we found that paranoia and teleology were related with a poorer identification of the sheep and wolf, but more interestingly, in the absence of a chase they were more confident in incorrect identification of the disc.

The main result was a relation between apparently higher-level teleology and paranoia, and lower-level perception of animacy from motion (in this case chasing), where there was none. Given that these experiences were associated with high confidence, we believe that they represent instances of social hallucination⁷.

Our data thus far suggest that paranoia and teleology both involve excessive perception of agency. However, we wanted to dissociate paranoia from teleology. In an exploratory analysis, we employed a method that allowed us to account for data that was extremely correlated within. This final analysis suggests that paranoia was associated with particularly poor detection of the sheep, and teleology particularly bad detection of the wolf. Perhaps paranoid people see more recipients of chasing, and people with higher teleology perceive more instigators of chasing.

These data place the locus of paranoia and excess teleology in the realm of perception, rather than reasoning. Perhaps to assuage paranoia or mollify excess teleology therapists might focus on clients’ low-level perception rather than trying to diffuse their reasoning biases. 

References

1. van Buren, B., Gao, T. & Scholl, B. J. What are the underlying units of perceived animacy? Chasing detection is intrinsically object-based. Psychon Bull Rev 24, 1604–1610 (2017).
2. Ongchoco, J. D. K., Castiello, S. & Corlett, P. R. Excessive teleological thinking is driven by aberrant associations and not by failure of reasoning. iScience 26, (2023).
3. Barnby, J. M., Mehta, M. A. & Moutoussis, M. The computational relationship between reinforcement learning, social inference, and paranoia. PLoS Comput Biol 18, e1010326 (2022).
4. Heider, F. & Simmel, M. An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior. Am J Psychol 57, 243 (1944).
5. Freeman, D. et al. The revised Green et al., Paranoid Thoughts Scale (R-GPTS): psychometric properties, severity ranges, and clinical cut-offs. Psychol Med 51, 244–253 (2021).
6. Lindeman, M. & Aarnio, K. Superstitious, magical, and paranormal beliefs: An integrative model. J Res Pers 41, 731–744 (2007).
7. Schmack, K., Bosc, M., Ott, T., Sturgill, J. F. & Kepecs, A. Striatal dopamine mediates hallucination-like perception in mice. Science 372, 33–34 (2021).