Susceptibility to auditory hallucinations is associated with spontaneous but not directed modulation of top-down expectations for speech.

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.

SUBMITTER: Alderson-Day B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8824703 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature