Pareidolia, priming, visual noise and visual hallucinations in LBD.

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  An investigation into the relationships between priming and level of visual noise on sensitively to pareidolia in individuals with Lewy Body Disorder who experience hallucinations, individual with Lewy Body Disorder who do not experience hallucinations and healthy controls.

• IRAS ID

  259040

• Contact name

  Alan Bowman

• Contact email

  a.bowman@tees.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  Teesside University

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 1 months, 18 days

• Research summary

  This study aims to look at the impact the level of visual noise (extraneous random visual data) in an image, and priming (showing either a related or unrelated image prior to the experiment stimuli) on pareidolia (perceiving meaningful patterns in random visual data) in individuals with Lewy body Disorders who experience visual hallucinations, individuals with Lewy body Disorder who do not experience visual hallucinations and in healthy controls. Clinical participants will be recruited from NHS Memory Clinical, NHS Movement Disorder Clinics and Charity Support Groups, Healthy Controls will largely comprise of spouses and partners of the clinical participant’s. Appropriate participants will be asked to engage in an experiment in which images are displayed on screen and they will be asked to verbally indicate what they can see in the image. There are also several short screening assessments they will be asked to participate in. The whole process can be done at the participant’s home or at a location of their choosing. The experiment will last approximately 90 minutes.
  The unique contribution of this study is that it will develop the understanding of the role priming may play in pareidolia, specifically through the inclusion of non-associated priming (showing of an image that dies not relate to the target image) which has not been attempted with this clinical population. It will also uniquely provide an opportunity to manipulate visual noise, to better understand the impact of this on pareidolia in the clinical population. The finding of this study may contribute to the better design of environments for individual with Lewy Body Disorders that aim to minimise pareidolia and possibly visual hallucinations.

• REC name

  North East - Newcastle & North Tyneside 1 Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  19/NE/0342

• Date of REC Opinion

  27 Feb 2020

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion