Dr Benjamin Alderson-Day benjamin.alderson-day@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Susceptibility to auditory hallucinations is associated with spontaneous but not directed modulation of top-down expectations for speech
Alderson-Day, Ben; Moffatt, Jamie; Lima, César F; Krishnan, Saloni; Fernyhough, Charles; Scott, Sophie K; Denton, Sophie; Leong, Ivy Yi Ting; Oncel, Alena D; Wu, Yu-Lin; Gurbuz, Zehra; Evans, Samuel
Authors
Jamie Moffatt
César F Lima
Saloni Krishnan
Professor Charles Fernyhough c.p.fernyhough@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Sophie K Scott
Sophie Denton
Ivy Yi Ting Leong
Alena D Oncel
Yu-Lin Wu
Zehra Gurbuz
Samuel Evans
Abstract
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs)—or hearing voices—occur in clinical and non-clinical populations, but their mechanisms remain unclear. Predictive processing models of psychosis have proposed that hallucinations arise from an over-weighting of prior expectations in perception. It is unknown, however, whether this reflects (i) a sensitivity to explicit modulation of prior knowledge or (ii) a pre-existing tendency to spontaneously use such knowledge in ambiguous contexts. Four experiments were conducted to examine this question in healthy participants listening to ambiguous speech stimuli. In experiments 1a (n = 60) and 1b (n = 60), participants discriminated intelligible and unintelligible sine-wave speech before and after exposure to the original language templates (i.e. a modulation of expectation). No relationship was observed between top-down modulation and two common measures of hallucination-proneness. Experiment 2 (n = 99) confirmed this pattern with a different stimulus—sine-vocoded speech (SVS)—that was designed to minimize ceiling effects in discrimination and more closely model previous top-down effects reported in psychosis. In Experiment 3 (n = 134), participants were exposed to SVS without prior knowledge that it contained speech (i.e. naïve listening). AVH-proneness significantly predicted both pre-exposure identification of speech and successful recall for words hidden in SVS, indicating that participants could actually decode the hidden signal spontaneously. Altogether, these findings support a pre-existing tendency to spontaneously draw upon prior knowledge in healthy people prone to AVH, rather than a sensitivity to temporary modulations of expectation. We propose a model of clinical and non-clinical hallucinations, across auditory and visual modalities, with testable predictions for future research.
Citation
Alderson-Day, B., Moffatt, J., Lima, C. F., Krishnan, S., Fernyhough, C., Scott, S. K., …Evans, S. (2022). Susceptibility to auditory hallucinations is associated with spontaneous but not directed modulation of top-down expectations for speech. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2022(1), Article niac002. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niac002
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jan 13, 2022 |
Online Publication Date | Feb 1, 2022 |
Publication Date | 2022 |
Deposit Date | Jun 30, 2022 |
Publicly Available Date | Jun 30, 2022 |
Journal | Neuroscience of Consciousness |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 2022 |
Issue | 1 |
Article Number | niac002 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niac002 |
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Copyright Statement
Advance Online Version © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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