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Updated: Feb 24, 2026

A Procedure to Observe Context-induced Renewal of Pavlovian-conditioned Alcohol-seeking Behavior in Rats
Published on: September 19, 2014
Pavlovian conditioning-induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors
A R Powers1, C Mathys2,3,4, P R Corlett5
1Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.
Abstract:
Some people hear voices that others do not, but only some of those people seek treatment. Using a Pavlovian learning task, we induced conditioned hallucinations in four groups of people who differed orthogonally in their voice-hearing and treatment-seeking statuses. People who hear voices were significantly more susceptible to the effect. Using functional neuroimaging and computational modeling of perception, we identified processes that differentiated voice-hearers from non-voice-hearers and treatment-seekers from non-treatment-seekers and characterized a brain circuit that mediated the conditioned hallucinations. These data demonstrate the profound and sometimes pathological impact of top-down cognitive processes on perception and may represent an objective means to discern people with a need for treatment from those without.
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