The Awareness & Modulation Lab os experimental psychology lab led by Devin Terhune, based in the Department of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London.

The central foci of our lab are how different features of awareness and perception can be altered or modulated in specific individuals or in response to different interventions. We use a range of methods from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and neuropsychiatry including EEG, pharmacological methods (nitrous oxide and psychedelics), psychophysics, and latent variable modelling.

Suggestion

Our lab investigates how verbal suggestions can alter different features of perception alone or in the contexts of hypnosis, placebo, and nocebo. We are interested in the use of verbal suggestions to induce hallucinations and other anomalous perceptual experiences as well as functional symptoms.

Other central themes in our research are the neurocognitive profiles of highly suggestible individuals, the latent structure of responsiveness to verbal suggestion, and heterogeneity among highly suggestible individuals. We are also actively studying how suggestion and placebo effects can function as a confounding factor in a range of contexts.

Dissociation

We study a range of dissociative phenomena including depersonalization, derealization, and alterations in identity in patients with dissociative disorders, functional neurological disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Additionally, we use nitrous oxide as a pharmacological model to study dissociative states and anomalous experiences in a controlled laboratory context.

Awareness and perception

Our research is primarily focused on time perception and hallucinations. For the former, we are interested in the structure and correlates of intra- and inter-individual variability in time perception and its neurophysiological and neurochemical substrates.

Our research on hallucinations includes both hallucination induction methods as well as assessments of hallucination phenomenology in patient groups. Both strands of research are motivated by a hypothesised link between dissociation and hallucinations.