Some years ago I read about the computational modeling of schizophrenia. (It was probably a summary in a layperson's science publication like Science News.)
As I recall, altering a single variable relating to memory caused a particular type of delusion to arise in the AI patient where, in the recalling of a narrative, characters in the action were substituted with each other, or with the speaker. In the article, this was referred to as an "agent-slotting error".
Web searches for "agent-slotting error" only seem to turn up references to the modeling research, so I would like to know:
- Is this type of error or delusion something that's actually associated with schizophrenia, or is it just considered a model for understanding aspects of delusions in schizophrenia?
- If it is something that actually occurs in schizophrenia, what is a term of art for it used generally in psychology rather than specifically in computational models of cognition?
Some clarifying examples from the papers:
From Comprehensive review: Computational modelling of schizophrenia Vincent Valtona:
The hyperlearning model could account for derailments from the original story through a confusion between the characters of different stories (‘agent-slotting errors’) leading to delusion-like ideas (Grasemann et al., 2009; Hoffman et al., 2011).
Grasemann et al. actually calls it “agency shifts”:
Applied to the story and sentence generator networks, hyperlearning robustly produced stable patterns of “agency shifts” where characters migrated between stories and produced meaningful new narratives.
