The Hitchhiker's guide to hallucination research.
Consciousness and cognition November 1, 2025 Inés Abalo-Rodríguez, Ana P Pinheiro
Hallucination research is an interdisciplinary field that combines psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article outlines key conceptual issues, such as how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations and whether they form a single construct. It reviews experimental paradigms that measure enduring hallucinatory tendencies versus those capturing hallucinations in real time, along with rating instruments like confidence scales and the phenomenological approach focusing on first-person experience. A checklist of variables—including sensory modality, context, cognitive style, affective state, and cultural background—is provided for researchers to consider before designing studies.