Correlates of hallucinatory experiences in the general population: an international multi-site replication study

Abstract

Hallucinatory experiences (HEs) can occur in both clinical and non-clinical groups. However, previous studies of the general population that have investigated cognitive mechanisms underlying HEs have yielded inconsistent results. In this study, we ran a large-scale preregistered multi-site study, in which general population participants (N = 1394, across 11 data collection sites and online) completed assessments of HEs and source memory, dichotic listening, backwards digit span and auditory signal detection tasks, plus a measure of adverse childhood experiences. We found that HEs were associated with performance on the signal detection task and a greater number of reported adverse childhood experiences, but not with any of the other cognitive measures employed. These findings are an important step in improving reproducibility in hallucinations research and suggest that the replicability of some findings regarding cognition in clinical samples need to be investigated.

When spirits speak: absorption, attribution, and identity among spiritualists who report “clairaudient” voice experiences

“…Participants recruited through Prolific were rewarded with a small payment (£.85). Prolific has previously been shown to provide high quality data (Peer et al, 2017), and studies recruiting through Prolific assessing hallucinatory experiences have shown negligible differences with face-to-face data collection (Moseley et al, 2020).…”

Cognitive and phenomenological characteristics of hallucination-proneness across the lifespan

“…On the other hand, small within-group correlations were also positive for the two younger age groups, while problems with source memory and other neurocognitive difficulties could potentially have obscured correlations with LSHS in older participants. We cannot therefore rule out source memory and hallucination-proneness having an unusual relationship across the lifespan, although given the range of inconsistent findings elsewhere (e.g., Moseley et al, 2020), we are loath to overintepret this finding.…”

Continuities and discontinuities in the cognitive mechanisms associated with clinical and non-clinical auditory verbal hallucinations

“…-this task required participants to detect a speech clip embedded in pink noise, presented through over-ear headphones (Sennheiser HD201). The protocol was similar to that used in a number of previous studies (Barkus et al, 2007;Moseley et al, 2014Moseley et al, , 2020. Participants were presented with 80 3.5s bursts of noise, with a 1.5s speech clip presented at one of four intensities in 48 trials (speech-present trials), and with no speech clip embedded in 32 trials (speech-absent trials).…”