ArticleCurrent biology : CB2018
A Perceptual Inference Mechanism for Hallucinations Linked to Striatal Dopamine.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 97 papers.
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Who cites it
97 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Apical integration theory provides a neural basis for understanding disorganization and consciousness in the schizophrenias.Current research in neurobiology · 2026Article
- Altered semantic prediction error processing with increasing schizotypal and autistic traits.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Phantom vibrations: An understudied marker of clinical risk for psychosis.Schizophrenia research · 2026Article
- Social priors and mentalizing connectivity across autistic and schizotypal traits.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Compensatory hallucinogenesis across three neuropsychiatric disorders: a Bayesian account.Brain communications · 2026Review
- Disrupted visual-to-semantic dynamics promote visual hallucinations in Parkinson's disease.NPJ Parkinson's disease · 2025Article
- Refining mechanistic models of hallucinations for enhanced translatability.Translational psychiatry · 2025Review
- Schizophrenia.Nature reviews. Disease primers · 2025Review
- Emergence and Dynamics of Delusions and Hallucinations Across Stages in Early Psychosis.Biological psychiatry · 2025Article
- Towards an Integrative Account of Potential Mechanisms Mediating the Path From Sleep Dysfunction to Hallucinations.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Review
- Hearing voices and other altered perceptual experiences across psychotic, mood, and anxiety disorders: from phenomenology and mechanisms to future directions.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Review
- An ace in the hole? Opportunities and limits of using mice to understand schizophrenia neurobiology.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Review
- 20 Years of Aberrant Salience in Psychosis: What Have We Learned?The American journal of psychiatry · 2025Review
- Exaggerated perception of change with greater sensory imprecision.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Temporal stability of semantic predictions in subclinical autistic and schizotypal personality traits.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Empirically Integrating the Evidence for Different Predictive Coding Components Using Auditory False Perception.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- A corticostriatal learning mechanism linking excess striatal dopamine and auditory hallucinations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A Computational Account of the Development and Evolution of Psychotic Symptoms.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
37 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Hallucinations, a cardinal feature of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, are known to depend on excessive striatal dopamine. However, an underlying cognitive mechanism linking dopamine dysregulation and the experience of hallucinatory percepts remains elusive. Bayesian models explain perception as an optimal combination of prior expectations and new sensory evidence, where perceptual distortions such as illusions and hallucinations may occur if prior expectations are afforded excessive weight. Such excessive weight of prior expectations, in turn, could stem from a gain-control process controlled by neuromodulators such as dopamine. To test for such a dopamine-dependent gain-control mechanism of hallucinations, we studied unmedicated patients with schizophrenia with varying degrees of hallucination severity and healthy individuals using molecular imaging with a pharmacological manipulation of dopamine, structural imaging, and a novel task designed to measure illusory changes in the perceived duration of auditory stimuli under different levels of uncertainty. Hallucinations correlated with a perceptual bias, reflecting disproportional gain on expectations under uncertainty. This bias could be pharmacologically induced by amphetamine, strongly correlated with striatal dopamine release, and related to cortical volume of the dorsal anterior cingulate, a brain region involved in tracking environmental uncertainty. These findings outline a novel dopamine-dependent mechanism for perceptual modulation in physiological conditions and further suggest that this mechanism may confer vulnerability to hallucinations in hyper-dopaminergic states underlying psychosis.
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