Computational psychosomatics and computational psychiatry: toward a joint framework for differential diagnosis

This article outlines how a core concept from theories of homeostasis and cybernetics, the inference-control loop, may be used to guide differential diagnosis in computational psychiatry and computational psychosomatics. In particular, we discuss 1) how conceptualizing perception and action as infer...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Petzschner, FH, Weber, LAE, Gard, T, Stephan, KE
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2017
Description
Summary:This article outlines how a core concept from theories of homeostasis and cybernetics, the inference-control loop, may be used to guide differential diagnosis in computational psychiatry and computational psychosomatics. In particular, we discuss 1) how conceptualizing perception and action as inference-control loops yields a joint computational perspective on brain-world and brain-body interactions and 2) how the concrete formulation of this loop as a hierarchical Bayesian model points to key computational quantities that inform a taxonomy of potential disease mechanisms. We consider the utility of this perspective for differential diagnosis in concrete clinical applications.