Taking modern psychiatry into the metaverse: Integrating augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies into psychiatric care.

The landscape of psychiatry is ever evolving and has recently begun to be influenced more heavily by new technologies. One novel technology which may have particular application to psychiatry is the metaverse, a three-dimensional digital social platform accessed via augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR/VR/MR). The metaverse allows the interaction of users in a virtual world which can be measured and manipulated, posing at once exciting new possibilities and significant potential challenges and risks.

All grown up: Computational theories of psychosis, complexity, and progress.

The theme of this special issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology is on predictive processing and how it can improve our fundamental understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders. Several articles focus on psychosis and demonstrate how the field of computational psychosis research has evolved and matured in recent years through the application of predictive processing theory. These articles suggest that whereas the computational mechanisms underlying psychosis may be complex, careful empirical and theoretical work-using more sophisticated models-can bridge gaps between previous results that appeared to be at odds while providing more explanatory power.

Precision and False Perceptual Inference.

Accurate perceptual inference fundamentally depends upon accurate beliefs about the reliability of sensory data. In this paper, we describe a Bayes optimal and biologically plausible scheme that refines these beliefs through a gradient descent on variational free energy. To illustrate this, we simulate belief updating during visual foraging and show that changes in estimated sensory precision (i.