Olivia Mak is a PhD Candidate at the LISN lab, now in her final year. Her research investigates how the brain’s predictive mechanisms for speaking and hearing might induce auditory verbal hallucinations in nonclinical populations. Using behavioural methods like conditioning target sounds with visual cues, introducing earworms, or asking people to count out loud during signal detection tasks, she aims to see if altering these predictions can change the false positive detection of non-existent target sounds amidst background noise. Her work helps deepen our understanding of auditory verbal hallucinations across the population spectrum.