Pavlovian Conditioning-Induced Hallucinations Result from Overweighting of Perceptual Priors

By Albert R. Powers, C. Mathys, Philip R. Corlett. Science, 2017

609 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neural mechanisms for hallucinations Pairing a stimulus in one modality (vision) with a stimulus in another (sound) can lead to task-induced hallucinations in healthy individuals. After many trials, people eventually report perceiving a nonexistent stimulus contingent on the presence of the previously paired stimulus. Powers et al. investigated how different groups of volunteers and patients respond to this conditioning paradigm. They used behavior, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to dissect the effect of perceptual priors versus sensory evidence on such induced hallucinations. People who are more prone to hear voices were more susceptible to the induced auditory hallucinations. The network of brain regions that was active during the conditioned hallucinations resembled the network observed during clinical symptom capture in individuals who hallucinate while in a brain scanner. Science, this issue p. 596 Perceptual beliefs, stimulus associations, and belief volatility drive task-induced hallucinations in voice-hearers. Some people hear voices that others do not, but only some of those people seek treatment. Using a Pavlovian learning task, we induced conditioned hallucinations in four groups of people who differed orthogonally in their voice-hearing and treatment-seeking statuses. People who hear voices were significantly more susceptible to the effect. Using functional neuroimaging and computational modeling of perception, we identified processes that differentiated voice-hearers from non–voice-hearers and treatment-seekers from non–treatment-seekers and characterized a brain circuit that mediated the conditioned hallucinations. These data demonstrate the profound and sometimes pathological impact of top-down cognitive processes on perception and may represent an objective means to discern people with a need for treatment from those without.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c78b7dc315b6920e78229e3528ad7febeb2c0521

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Schizophrenia, Dopamine and the Striatum: From Biology to Symptoms (2019, background): “Recent research has demonstrated that auditory hallucinations are related to a greater ability of priors to influence perception [98].”
The Predictive Coding Account of Psychosis (2018, background): “The presence of strong priors and their immunity to updating were associated with strong insula and hippocampal responses, respectively (74).”
How Do Expectations Shape Perception? (2018, background): “On the one hand, the false percepts (hallucinations) and beliefs (delusions) characteristic of schizophrenia are proposed to be caused by the misperception of inner states as a result of overly strong expectations [9], something that can also occur in healthy individuals [9,137].”
REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics (2019, background): “, 2017) and schizophrenia (Powers et al., 2017) to addiction (Gu, 2018) and depression (Chekroud, 2015).”
Oscillatory signatures of monitoring and anticipatory strategies for probabilistic vs deterministic cues (2025, unknown): “Numerous studies ( Powers et al., 2017; Schmack et al., 2013; Stuke et al., 2021; Tulver et al., 2019) have highlighted substantial interindividual variations within the general population concerning the weighting of prior information.”