A study of imagery mechanisms in people with visual hallucinations
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An exploratory study of imagery mechanisms in people with visual hallucinations in the context of psychosis.
IRAS ID
143089
Contact name
Nazik Nemat
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Foundation Trust
Research summary
Complex visual hallucinations (VH) are the experience of seeing things that are not really there e.g. seeing a figure of a person when the room is empty. Imagery is the “re-creation of perceptual experience“ (Holmes et al 2013, pg 3). Visual imagery has been described as “seeing with the minds eye“, essentially having a picture in your mind of an object, person, or scenario. An individual could have an image of where the apples are in the supermarket, or an image of their family on their wedding day.
Kosslyn et al (2001) reviewed a number of neurological studies that show that visual mental imagery and visual perception have similar mechanisms in the brain pathways. This shows imagery and perception share similar processes.
Lots of people with psychosis experience difficulties with distressing visual hallucinations. As these visions can be very detailed and vivid, we want to understand more about how people who experience visual hallucinations see other things. This will help us to understand more about the differences between those people who have hallucinations and those who do not.
Firstly we want to replicate Brebion et al (2008)imagery task. This task asks participants to remember words and pictures, then after a delay, a list of words are read out and the particpants have to recognise whether they were presented as words or pictures. People with visual hallucinations may have confusion about the origin of images and this task will show us whether this true.
Secondly we want to give people questionnaires about how often they use imagery, the vividness of their imagery and the realness of their imagery. This will help is to understand the type of imagery people with visual hallucinations experience. Both the imagery task and questionnaires will be given to people with and without visual hallucinations.
REC name
North East - Tyne & Wear South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/NE/0013
Date of REC Opinion
31 Jan 2014
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion