Background 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. Study Design 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. Study Results 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. Conclusions 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.

中文翻译：

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一般人群样本中易产生幻觉的个体的感觉精确度降低且对先验的依赖增加的证据

背景 越来越多的证据表明，与传入的感官证据相比，有幻觉的人过分重视感知信念。过去的研究证明先前的体重过重使用了简单的非语言刺激。然而，精神病中的幻听通常是复杂的和语言性的。正在处理的听觉信息类型与其感知质量之间可能存在相互作用，从而产生幻觉。研究设计 我们对 88 名一般人群参与者的在线样本进行了语言版本的条件性幻觉 (CH) 任务。收集与幻觉倾向、幻觉严重程度、刺激阈值和刺激检测率相关的指标。使用数据来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。研究结果重复过去的结果，在最近有幻觉经历的人和具有高幻觉倾向的参与者中观察到较高的 CH 率；CH 率与之前权重的增加呈正相关；先前权重的增加与幻觉的严重程度有关。与过去的结果不同，最近有过幻觉经历的参与者以及幻觉倾向较高的参与者具有较高的刺激阈值，对最高阈值下的刺激的敏感性较低，并且反应信心较低，这与感官证据的较低精度一致。结论 我们使用 CH 任务的语言版本重复了这一发现，即 CH 率增加和近期幻觉与先前权重增加相关。结果支持了在先前的权重和幻觉倾向之间的相互作用中感觉精度降低的作用。