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.

中文翻译：

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对幻听的敏感性与自上而下的言语期望的自发但非定向调节有关。

幻听（AVH）或幻听发生在临床和非临床人群中，但其机制仍不清楚。精神病的预测处理模型提出，幻觉是由于过分重视先前的感知期望而产生的。然而，尚不清楚这是否反映了（i）对先验知识的显式调整的敏感性，或（ii）在不明确的背景下自发使用此类知识的预先存在的倾向。我们进行了四项实验，以健康参与者聆听模糊的言语刺激来研究这个问题。在实验 1a (n = 60) 和 1b (n = 60) 中，参与者在接触原始语言模板（即期望调制）之前和之后区分可理解和不可理解的正弦波语音。在自上而下的调制和两种常见的幻觉倾向测量之间没有观察到任何关系。实验 2（n = 99）用不同的刺激——正弦声码语音（SVS）证实了这种模式，其目的是最大限度地减少歧视中的天花板效应，并更接近地模拟先前在精神病中报告的自上而下的效应。在实验 3（n = 134）中，参与者在事先不知道 SVS 包含语音（即天真聆听）的情况下接触了 SVS。AVH 倾向显着预测了语音的预暴露识别和 SVS 中隐藏单词的成功回忆，这表明参与者实际上可以自发地解码隐藏的信号。总而言之，这些发现支持了易患 AVH 的健康人自发地利用先验知识的倾向，而不是对期望的临时调节的敏感性。我们提出了一种跨听觉和视觉方式的临床和非临床幻觉模型，并为未来的研究提供了可测试的预测。