Event:

Background: Auditory hallucinations are common in early psychosis and may arise when prior expectations are weighted too heavily relative to sensory evidence, a bias that stress may amplify. The ACHI study tests this hypothesis by combining a conditioned hallucination (CH) paradigm, computational modelling, and functional neuroimaging.
Methods: Participants detect tones embedded in noise. Each block begins with repeated pairings of a visual and verbal cue with clearly audible tones. Tone intensity is then reduced and tones are frequently omitted, so that "yes" responses on tone-absent trials indicate conditioned hallucinations. Midway through each block, participants complete a stress inducing task (MIST), an untimed control version, or a neutral word task. Mood, arousal, pleasure, and arousal are rated before and after. A Hierarchical Gaussian Filter is fitted to each participant’s responses to estimate v, the relative weighting of priors over sensory input. One session is acquired with 3T fMRI.
Aims: We will test whether early psychosis patients show more CHs and higher v than healthy controls, and whether stress increases CHs, especially in patients. Neuroimaging analyses will examine stress- and CH-related activity and connectivity across control and salience, affective and reward, and auditory regions. These effects will then be related to CH rate, v, and stress-induced mood change.

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