Hallucination-Proneness is Associated With a Decrease in Robust Averaging of Perceptual Evidence.

ABSTRACT:

Background and hypothesis

Hallucinations are characterized by disturbances in perceptual decision-making about environmental stimuli. When integrating across multiple stimuli to form a perceptual decision, typical observers engage in "robust averaging" by down-weighting extreme perceptual evidence, akin to a statistician excluding outlying data. Furthermore, observers adapt to contexts with more unreliable evidence by increasing this down-weighting strategy. Here, we test the hypothesis that hallucination-prone individuals (n = 38 high vs n = 91 low) would show a decrease in this robust averaging and diminished sensitivity to changes in evidence variance.

Study design

We used a multielement perceptual averaging task to elicit dichotomous judgments about the "average color" (

SUBMITTER: Larsen EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10754164 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature