Hallucinations

…planning and control, addressing hallucinations, long-horizon behavior, human communication and environmental adaptability. Socially aware robot navigation is the application domain. Applicants need a doctorate, Python/PyTorch, robotics knowledge and English; foundation-model experience is desirable. Appointment: 12 months; advertised start 2027-01-01. €2788 gross/month.

Hallucinations are percepts experienced in the absence of external sensory input. Patients with hallucinations show both behavioral and neural alterations in statistical learning in simple sensory tasks. Predictive processing accounts of hallucinations suggest that these alterations bias patients’ perception toward their sensory expectations. However, 1) whether this framework holds when considering real-world hallucinations with complex content and 2) which upstream neural mechanisms cause these alterations in learning are hotly debated. To address these questions, we used fMRI to record neur

In schizophrenia, disrupted perceptual processes are attributed to both hallucinations and delusions in positive symptoms [1, 2]. However, it remains unclear how top-down and bottom-up processes are represented across a visual hierarchy related to distinct symptoms, such as hallucinations, delusions, and negative symptoms. Our goal is to identify the visual areas involved in aberrant top-down and bottom-up processes that contribute to distinct symptoms in schizophrenia. To investigate this, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment with a perceptual decision-making

False percepts induced by sensory conditioning are a promising laboratory model for hallucinations and similar illusory phenomena, with links to both clinical symptoms and neurobiological features of psychosis. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between extracellular dopamine levels, as quantified by the dopamine D2/3 receptor agonist ligand [11C]-(+)-PHNO, and confidence with which conditioned auditory percepts are reported.To this end, ten healthy volunteers (2m, 8f) completed a cross-modal sensory conditioning task after undergoing a bolus plus constant infusio

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and Parkinson's disease dementia (PDD) share similarities in pathology and clinical presentation and come under the umbrella term of Lewy body dementias (LBD). Fluctuating cognition is a key symptom in LBD and manifests as altered levels of alertness and attention, with a marked difference between best and worst performance. Cognition and alertness can change over seconds or minutes to hours and days of obtundation. Cognitive fluctuations can have significant impacts on the quality of life of people with LBD as well as potentially contribute to the exacerbation

Hallucinations are a core symptom of psychotic disorders and have traditionally been difficult to study biologically. We developed a new behavioral computational approach to measure hallucinations-like perception in humans and mice alike. Using targeted neural circuit manipulations, we identified a causal role for striatal dopamine in mediating hallucination-like perception. Building on this, we currently investigate the neural and immunological upstream regulators of these dopaminergic circuits with the goal to identify new biological treatment targets for psychosis

…Delusions and hallucinations are the core symptoms of psychosis and often co-occur. Yet, different predictive-processing alterations have been proposed for these two symptom dimensions, according to which the relative weighting of prior beliefs in perceptual inference is