Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Szymanek, Piotr
• Homan, Marek
• van Elk, Michiel
• Hohol, Mateusz

Titel

Effects of expectations and sensory unreliability on voice detection – A preregistered study

Ist Teil von

• Consciousness and cognition, 2024-08, Vol.123, p.103718, Article 103718

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Voice hearing is often found in healthy individuals and across religious traditions.•We investigated a mechanism of voice hearing grounded in predictive processing.•We found that response bias in detection of voices is driven by expectations.•The effect of expectations is stronger when sensory data is unreliable.•This predictive mechanism can underlie non-clinical voice hearing experiences. The phenomenon of “hearing voices” can be found not only in psychotic disorders, but also in the general population, with individuals across cultures reporting auditory perceptions of supernatural beings. In our preregistered study, we investigated a possible mechanism of such experiences, grounded in the predictive processing model of agency detection. We predicted that in a signal detection task, expecting less or more voices than actually present would drive the response bias toward a more conservative and liberal response strategy, respectively. Moreover, we hypothesized that including sensory noise would enhance these expectancy effects. In line with our predictions, the findings show that detection of voices relies on expectations and that this effect is especially pronounced in the case of unreliable sensory data. As such, the study contributes to our understanding of the predictive processes in hearing and the building blocks of voice hearing experiences.