Our latest preprint is now live on bioRxiv! We developed a new virtual reality paradigm to simulate “Virtual Hallucinations” and explore how people judge the Sense of Reality – our internal gauge for whether experiences feel real.

By combining psychophysics, physiology (pupil, heart, and movement), and computational modeling, we show how perception, belief, and prior expectations shape SoR. This work not only offers insight into typical and disrupted SoR but also provides a rare, tractable framework for studying altered perception in psychiatry, development, and immersive technologies.

Drori, G., Bar-Tal, P., Hirsh, O., Berlinger, A., Goldberg, N., Zvilichovsky, Y., Hertz, U., Zaidel, A., & Salomon, R. (2025). Unreal? A Behavioral, Physiological, and Computational Model of the Sense of Reality. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.07.647542