BMI Progress Reports 2021 // Prof. Blanke's Lab: E. Blondiaux: Robot-induced specific hallucinations in health and Parkinson's disease

Hallucinations are defined as aberrant perceptual experiences without the corresponding external stimuli and despite being present in various clinical populations, their underlying mechanisms are poorly understood, also related to the lack of methods to induce hallucinations under experimental conditions outside the clinical setting. In this talk, I will focus on a specific hallucination called presence hallucination (PH; defined as the vivid sensation that someone is nearby although no one is present) and present how we developed a method to induce PH in healthy subjects and patients using a robotics-based approach that applies conflicting sensorimotor conflicts. I will present this new method and procedure as well as brain imaging results (using an MRI-compatible device) in healthy subjects and give an overview of the results obtained by translating this approach to several clinical populations, especially in patients with Parkinson’s disease, where hallucinations are disturbing and frequent non-motor symptoms, which constitute a major risk factor for psychosis and dementia.