Head: Prof. Dr. med. Philipp Sterzer

Psychotic disorders are characterized by perceptual and thought disturbances such as hallucinations and delusions. The main focus of the Translational Psychiatry Lab is to improve the understanding of the neuronal mechanisms giving rise to psychosis.

While people suffering from psychotic disorders are often severely impaired in their daily living, effective treatment remains a major challenge. In order to improve existing treatment strategies and develop novel therapeutic approaches, a better understanding of the mechanistic processes underlying psychosis is urgently needed. The approach of the Translational Psychiatry Lab is based on the notion that our brains use an inner model of the world to make predictions about the incoming sensory data, thereby generating our subjective reality. Alterations of these processes can lead to the aberrant perceptual experiences and false beliefs that are characteristic of psychosis. The Translational Psychiatry Lab aims at developing innovative experimental approaches towards the investigation of basic processes in perception on the one hand; and at an improved mechanistic understanding of how these processes are altered in psychosis and other psychiatric disorders on the other hand. Methods used by the Translational Psychiatry Lab include state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI and EEG as well as psychophysics, eye tracking, transcranial magnetic stimulation and computational modelling.

Publications

• Translational Psychiatry
• Dr. Philipp Sterzer

Members of the research group

• Team