Our perception of the world around us is shaped by memories and the resulting predictions about future events. This happens both on a consciously experienced level, but also in very short (in the range of milliseconds), unconscious processes in the brain. A deviation in the integration of such temporal aspects in the perceptual process is seen as a possible cause of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. In a first project, we were able to find experimental confirmation of this with the help of the electroencephalogram (EEG): In two different experimental paradigms, we found that the neural processing steps that are evoked by stimulus presentation usually occurs at the same time in neurotypicals across stimulus repetitions see Figure 1. In patients with schizophrenia, however, this brain activity had the same power in the single trials, but not as precisely timed to the stimulus presentation as in neurotypicals. Such millisecond shifts in brain activity could influence processing on longer time scales and thus higher and more complex content and have an impact on conscious experience and thus on the symptom level.

In a next step, we will investigate the integration of temporal aspects in perception when the sensory information is noisy or ambiguous. In the lab, we can evoke this situation using ambiguous figures where one image allows for two possible interpretations (e.g. the Necker cube, see Fig. 2 & online demo: https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-Necker/index-de.html).