Fig. 1.

A gradient of a precision modulation deficit affecting the highest levels of priors in schizophrenia is hypothesized to result in speech disturbances in social settings. When demands arise, patients cannot afford increased precision to their higher-order “adaptive” priors. When engaging a second person, this imprecision presents as a failure of commitment to a discourse plan (or narrative) with low confidence on the message choice that increases the likelihood of frequent shifts in conversational goal, messages and speech structure.