Mrs Chantal Miller-Silva

My research aims to identify the mechanisms underlying different stages of psychotic illness. In particular, I am interested in the idea that the brain relies on hierarchical Bayesian inference, a process that may become derailed in disorders such as schizophrenia. Given that the sensory information we receive is ambiguous and unreliable, this mechanism combines sensory input from the environment with our prior expectations about this input, enabling us to more accurately define and update our beliefs about the world. My studies seek to characterise this process in the healthy brain and determine how perturbations in this mechanism can give rise to delusions and hallucinations in psychosis. This requires a combination of methods, including computational modelling, behavioural analyses and functional neuroimaging. My PhD is kindly supervised by Dr Graham Murray and Professor Paul Fletcher and is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Doctoral Training Programme.