Associations of hallucination proneness with free-recall intrusions and response bias in a nonclinical sample.
BACKGROUND
Hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia have been associated with a liberal response bias in signal detection and recognition tasks and with various types of source-memory error. We investigated the associations of hallucination proneness with free-recall intrusions and false recognitions of words in a nonclinical sample.


METHODS
A total of 81 healthy individuals were administered a verbal memory task involving free recall and recognition of one nonorganizable and one semantically organizable list of words. Hallucination proneness was assessed by means of a self-rating scale.


RESULTS
Global hallucination proneness was associated with free-recall intrusions in the nonorganizable list and with a response bias reflecting tendency to make false recognitions of nontarget words in both types of list. The verbal hallucination score was associated with more intrusions and with a reduced tendency to make false recognitions of words.


CONCLUSIONS
The associations between global hallucination proneness and two types of verbal memory error in a nonclinical sample corroborate those observed in patients with schizophrenia and suggest that common cognitive mechanisms underlie hallucinations in psychiatric and nonclinical individuals.
Brébion
Gildas
G
Unit of Research and Development, Sant Joan de Déu-Serveis de Salut Mental y CIBERSAM, Barcelona, Spain. g.brebion@iop.kcl.ac.uk
Larøi
Frank
F
Van der Linden
Martial
M
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D015982:Bias; D005260:Female; D006212:Hallucinations / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult