Robotically-induced auditory-verbal hallucinations: combining self-monitoring and strong perceptual priors

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• Auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVH) are common distressing psychotic symptoms with unknown etiology.
• Current research models AVH as either a self-monitoring deficit or due to strong perceptual priors.
• Studying AVH in non-patients offers a novel approach to understanding hallucinations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test and integrate self-monitoring and strong perceptual prior models of AVH.
• To develop and validate a robotic procedure for inducing AVH-like phenomena.
• To investigate the relationship between induced AVH-like sensations and theoretical accounts.

Main Methods:

• A robotic procedure was developed to create sensorimotor conflicts (self-monitoring perturbation) and otherness sensations (perceptual prior).
• Healthy participants underwent experimental conditions manipulating these factors.
• Voice detection tasks quantified AVH-like phenomena via false alarm rates.

Main Results:

• The robotic procedure successfully induced AVH-like phenomena in healthy individuals.
• Increased sensorimotor conflicts correlated with more AVH-like sensations (supporting self-monitoring account).
• Otherness sensations led to more AVH-like sensations when detecting external voices (supporting strong-priors account).

Conclusions:

• An experimental method to induce AVH-like sensations in non-hallucinating individuals was demonstrated.
• The findings integrate self-monitoring and strong-priors accounts of AVH phenomenology.
• This research provides new insights into the mechanisms underlying hallucinations.