Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 35, Issue 37, Pages 12947-12953Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1520-15.2015
Keywords
expectation; fMRI; hallucination; perception; spontaneous fluctuations
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Funding
- James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF Scholar Award for Understanding Human Cognition)
- Ministere de l'Enseignement Superieur et de la Recherche
- European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant DynaMind Project)
- Agence Nationale Recherche [ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC, ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL]
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According to theoretical frameworks casting perception as inference, vision results from the integration of bottom-up visual input with top-down expectations. Under conditions of strongly degraded sensory input, this may occasionally result in false perceptions in the absence of a sensory signal, also termed hallucinations. Here, we investigated whether spontaneous prestimulus activity patterns in sensory circuits, which may embody a participant's prior expectations, predispose the observer toward false perceptions. Specifically, we used fMRI to investigate whether the representational content of prestimulus activity in early visual cortex is linked to subsequent perception during a challenging detection task. Humanparticipants were asked to detect oriented gratings of a particular orientation that were embedded in noise. We found two characteristics of prestimulus activity that predisposed participants to hallucinations: overall lower prestimulus activity and a bias in the prestimulus activity patterns toward the to-be-detected (expected) grating. These results suggest that perceptual hallucinations may be due to an imprecise and biased state of sensory circuits preceding sensory evidence collection.
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