Project description
The perceptual reality of hallucinations
Although psychotic disorders impact up to 3 % of the global population, treating their most disruptive symptoms, such as hallucinations, remains challenging. Experimental studies often employ hallucination-like percepts, but recent research suggests these methods may reflect decisional biases rather than changes in sensory processing. This hampers the development of new treatments and reliable animal models. Supported by the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions programme, the MISHAPS project seeks to create a behavioural approach to distinguish between perception and response. By integrating magnetoencephalography with dopaminergic measurements, the project aims to identify solid neural markers of subjective experience. With objective, bias-resistant indicators, MISHAPS has the potential to transform the evaluation of psychiatric therapies and alter scientific perspectives on the hallucinating brain.
Objective
Psychotic disorders are amongst the most debilitating psychiatric conditions, estimated to have a global lifetime prevalence of 3%. Unlike other challenges in biomedicine, psychiatric conditions such as psychosis are predominantly characterized by subjectively experienced symptoms (e.g. hallucinations). A promising approach has conceptualized hallucination-like percepts (HALIPs) as confidently reporting a stimulus that was not presented, providing a tractable model of hallucinations across humans and animals. However, recent findings suggest that commonly used methods to measure subjective experience may be confounded by decision biases unrelated to perception. This raises the critical question of whether HALIPs truly reflect perceptual distortions, or instead decisional strategies. The answer is crucial: if HALIPs are not perceptual, animal models and clinical trials based on them risk mischaracterise the mechanisms of hallucinations, ultimately undermining treatment development.
The MISHAPS project aims to resolve this issue by establishing whether HALIPs arise from altered perception and by comparing them to the neural signatures of subjective experience in humans. Using a novel behavioral paradigm that isolates perception from decision-making, I will: (I) determine the extent to which HALIPs are perceptual, (ii) examine the role of dopamine-related physiological signals in their occurrence, and (iii) identify the neural markers of HALIPs using magnetoencephalography. By clarifying the perceptual basis of hallucinatory experiences, MISHAPS will strengthen translational models of hallucinations, advance computational psychiatry, and provide a framework that can be leveraged in pharmaceutical research, for instance by offering objective and bias-resistant behavioural markers to evaluate the efficacy of drugs targeting hallucinatory symptoms.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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WC1E 6BT London
United Kingdom
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