The Perception of Visual Distortions in Virtual Reality and Their Association with Psychosis-Relevant Traits

Background Visual distortions (VDs) are frequently reported but insufficiently characterized in early psychosis and may reflect alterations in perceptual processing. Computational accounts emphasize aberrant precision-weighting of sensory evidence and prior expectations, but most empirical work has used simplified laboratory stimuli. It remains unclear whether these mechanistic accounts generalize to more naturalistic perceptual contexts. MethodsWe developed virtual reality (VR) tasks simulating VDs in photorealistic scenes and explored associations between VD perception and psychosis-relevant traits in a non-clinical sample. 120 healthy adults completed three tasks designed to probe complementary aspects of perceptual inference: (1) a naïve detection task (NDT) assessing expectation-driven false percepts of unspecified visual changes; (2) a perceptual uncertainty task (PUT) testing how detection under ambiguous sensory evidence is shaped by recent trial history; and (3) an adaptive two-interval forced-choice task (2-IFC) quantifying bottom-up sensitivity to psychosis-like VDs. Psychosis-relevant traits were assessed using validated questionnaires of delusional ideation, anomalous perceptual experiences, and schizotypal traits. ResultsHigher levels of delusional ideation and schizotypy were associated with stronger expectation effects, reflected in increased false percepts in the NDT trial without changes and enhanced detection of near-threshold distortions when these trials followed distortion-present trials in the PUT. These traits were also linked to reduced 2-IFC perceptual sensitivity to VDs, particularly brightness changes.ConclusionsThese findings demonstrate the feasibility of VR-based VD assessment and provide initial evidence that individual differences in VD perception relate to psychosis-relevant traits. Results suggest contributions from both diminished sensory sensitivity and increased reliance on expectations in naturalistic perceptual contexts.