New Research: Psychedelic versus Stroboscopic Visual Hallucinations (preprint)

How do hallucinations induced in the lab differ from psychedelic hallucinations? 

Laboratory-induced strobe hallucinations were primarily geometric. Psychedelic experiences also contained geometric elements but more frequently included complex, scene-like imagery.

We developed a questionnaire to measure the content of visual hallucinations across contexts, which you can read about in our new preprint.

Hallucinations we induced in the laboratory, using strobe lights, tended to be predominantly geometric and simple, while psychedelics were associated with more complex imagery embedded within broader altered states of consciousness.

You can read the preprint here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qv5hz_v1

Trevor Hewitt, Anil K Seth, David J Schwartzman (2026) Measuring the Content of Visual Hallucinations Induced by Psychedelics and Stroboscopic Light: The Six-Dimensional Visual Hallucination Questionnaire (6D-VHQ). PsyArXiv. doi: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qv5hz_v1