Department of Psychiatry, McGill University School of Medicine, Montreal, Canada.
Yale University School of Medicine and the Connecticut Mental Health Center, New Haven, CT, USA.
Schizophr Bull. 2024 Mar 7;50(2):349-362. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbad136.
There is increasing evidence that people with hallucinations overweight perceptual beliefs relative to incoming sensory evidence. Past work demonstrating prior overweighting has used simple, nonlinguistic stimuli. However, auditory hallucinations in psychosis are often complex and linguistic. There may be an interaction between the type of auditory information being processed and its perceived quality in engendering hallucinations.
We administered a linguistic version of the conditioned hallucinations (CH) task to an online sample of 88 general population participants. Metrics related to hallucination-proneness, hallucination severity, stimulus thresholds, and stimulus detection rates were collected. Data were used to fit parameters of a Hierarchical Gaussian Filter (HGF) model of perceptual inference to determine how latent perceptual states influenced task behavior.
Replicating past results, higher CH rates were observed both in those with recent hallucinatory experiences as well as participants with high hallucination-proneness; CH rates were positively correlated with increased prior weighting; and increased prior weighting was related to hallucination severity. Unlike past results, participants with recent hallucinatory experiences as well as those with higher hallucination-proneness had higher stimulus thresholds, lower sensitivity to stimuli presented at the highest threshold, and had lower response confidence, consistent with lower precision of sensory evidence.
We replicate the finding that increased CH rates and recent hallucinations correlate with increased prior weighting using a linguistic version of the CH task. Results support a role for reduced sensory precision in the interplay between prior weighting and hallucination-proneness.
越来越多的证据表明，出现幻觉的人会过度重视感知信念，而不是输入的感官证据。过去证明存在过度重视的研究使用的是简单的非语言刺激。然而，精神分裂症中的听觉幻觉通常是复杂的和语言性的。在产生幻觉时，正在处理的听觉信息的类型及其感知质量之间可能存在相互作用。
我们对 88 名普通人群的在线样本进行了语言条件性幻觉（CH）任务的测试。收集了与幻觉倾向、幻觉严重程度、刺激阈值和刺激检测率相关的指标。数据用于拟合感知推理的分层高斯滤波器（HGF）模型的参数，以确定潜在感知状态如何影响任务行为。
与过去的结果一致，有近期幻觉体验的人和高幻觉倾向的人都观察到更高的 CH 率；CH 率与增加的先验权重呈正相关；并且增加的先验权重与幻觉严重程度有关。与过去的结果不同，有近期幻觉体验的人和高幻觉倾向的人具有更高的刺激阈值、对最高阈值下呈现的刺激的敏感性降低，以及响应信心降低，这与感官证据的精度降低一致。
我们使用 CH 任务的语言版本复制了增加的 CH 率和近期幻觉与增加的先验权重相关的发现。结果支持在先验权重和幻觉倾向之间的相互作用中，降低感官精度的作用。
