How do Humans Process AI-generated Hallucination Contents: a Neuroimaging Study

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 16 May 2026] How do Humans Process AI-generated Hallucination Contents: a Neuroimaging Study Shuqi Zhu, Yi Zhong, Ziyi Ye, Bangde Du, Yujia Zhou, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu While AI-generated hallucinations pose considerable risks, the underlying cognitive mechanisms by which humans can successfully recognize or be misled by these hallucinations remain unclear. To address this problem, this paper explores humans' neural dynamics to characterize how the brain processes hallucinated content. We record EEG signals from 27 participants while they are performing a verification task to judge the correctness of image descriptions generated by a multi-modal large language model (MLLM). Based on an averaged event-related potential (ERP) study, we reveal that multiple cognitive processes, e.g., semantic integration, inferential processing, memory retrieval, and cognitive load, exhibit distinct patterns when humans process hallucinated versus non-hallucinated content. Notably, neural responses to hallucinations that were misjudged versus correctly judged by human participants showed significant differences. This indicates that misjudged AI-generated hallucinations failed to trigger the standard neurocognitive fact verification pathway. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2605.16953 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.16953v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16953 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Shuqi Zhu [view email] [v1] Sat, 16 May 2026 12:08:22 UTC (1,724 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)