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Cognitive Vulnerability to Auditory Hallucination

Preferred Imagery Mode and Spatial Location of Sounds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Alfred B. Heilbrun Jr. ,
Nancy Blum  and
Marilyn Haas
Alfred B. Heilbrun Jr.
Affiliation:
The Psychological Center of the Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA
Nancy Blum
Affiliation:
The Psychological Center of the Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA
Marilyn Haas
Affiliation:
The Psychological Center of the Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA
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Summary

Goldstone and Sarbin proposed that auditory hallucinations occur because imagery in a non-preferred sensory mode is more easily misinterpreted as having an external origin. This led to the hypothesis that auditory hallucinators would show less preference for auditory than for visual imagery. Our results suggest that this is true. We also compared the vividness of internally-generated auditory imagery with that of visual imagery, independently of preference, to see whether vividness was impaired in the non-preferred mode in hallucinators. The evidence suggested that this was not the case, but we did find a significantly deficient capacity for creating vivid images of either kind in process patients (i.e. those with poor premorbid status) compared with reactive (good premorbid) patients, regardless of any history of hallucinations. The withdrawal of external attention which characterizes process patients might also be expected to impair their ability to confirm or disconfirm the external origin of an auditory stimulus. We predicted therefore that process hallucinators would be particularly incompetent in spatial location of sounds: our experimental results confirmed this to be the case.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 143 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 294 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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