Errorless and trial-and-error learning of object locations in patients with executive deficits after brain injury.

Studies investigating the efficacy of errorless learning (EL), a rehabilitation method in which the occurrence of errors during learning are eliminated, have predominantly involved patients with memory impairment. However, the most recent perspective on the underlying mechanism of EL explicitly takes executive processes into account. The aim of this study was to investigate whether EL of object locations is beneficial for memory performance compared to trial-and-error learning (TEL) in patients with acquired brain injury (ABI) experiencing executive deficits (N = 15) and matched healthy controls (N = 15). Participants completed an EL and TEL condition of a computerized spatial learning task, in which the location of everyday objects had to be memorized. The number of errors made during learning was predetermined, varying from 0 (EL condition) to 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 errors (TEL condition). Results showed a beneficial effect of EL on memory performance in both ABI patients and controls (p < .001), but this advantage was not larger in ABI patients compared to controls and was not moderated by the amount of errors made during learning.

Prevention is better than cure: effects of errors on memory performance during spatial learning in healthy aging.

BACKGROUND: Healthy aging is accompanied by a decline in learning ability and memory capacity. One widely-studied method to improve learning outcome is by reducing the occurrence of errors during learning (errorless learning; EL). However, there is also evidence that committing errors during learning (trial-and-error learning; TEL) may benefit memory performance. We argue that these inconsistent findings could be driven by a lack of control over the error frequency in traditional EL and TEL paradigms. AIM: This study employed a spatial learning task to study EL and TEL and to determine the impact of error frequency on memory recall in healthy older adults (OA; N = 68) and young adults (YA; N = 60). METHOD: Four groups of participants (YA-EL, YA-TEL, OA-EL, OA-TEL) were instructed to first place and memorize the locations of everyday objects in a chest of drawers presented on a computer screen, and in whom memory recall performance was later tested. In the TEL condition, the amount of errors made before the correct drawer was 'found' was predetermined, varying from 0 to 5. During the EL condition, every first attempt was correct (i.e., no errors were made). RESULTS: We found better overall performance in YA compared to OA and a beneficial effect of EL in both age groups. However, the amount of errors committed during learning did not influence accuracy of memory recall. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that elimination of errors during learning can benefit memory performance in both YA and OA compared to TEL.

Impairment of Both Reward and Punishment Learning in Males Who Have Sexually Offended Against a Child.

Prior studies suggest that persons with a sexual offense against a child (PSOCs) present with an impairment in learning from reinforcement, which may contribute to the behavioral dysregulation often seen in PSOCs. Therefore, gaining more insight into the nature of this impairment seems essential to better understand child sexual (re)offending. Using a passive avoidance task, we found that PSOCs (n = 57) have difficulties with selecting behaviors that are associated with reward and suppressing behaviors that are associated with punishment relative to nonoffending men (n = 33), but not compared with persons with a nonsexual offense history (n = 31). The latter ability was particularly compromised in nonpedophilic PSOCs. By unraveling a source of pathology in the mechanisms that are involved in behavioral control, this study helps setting a step toward new, more tailored, therapeutic approaches.

Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Improves Reactive Response Inhibition in Healthy Volunteers.

Involvement of the cerebellum to non-motor related aspects of behavior is becoming increasingly clear. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the cerebellum in reactive and proactive behavioral control and interference. In a double-blind controlled within-subject design, 26 healthy volunteers underwent real and sham cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) while performing a go/no-go task and a delay discounting task. Results showed that the number of go/no-go commission errors was significantly lower during real as compared with sham cerebellar tDCS. No effects of tDCS were observed on delay discounting. Our findings provide further behavioral support for the involvement of the cerebellum in fast neural processes associated with response inhibition.

The impact of error frequency on errorless and errorful learning of object locations using a novel paradigm.

Errorless learning (EL) is an approach in which errors are eliminated or reduced as much as possible while learning of new information or skills. In contrast, during trial-and-error - or errorful - learning (TEL) errors are not reduced and are often even promoted. There is a complex and conflicting pattern of evidence whether EL or TEL may result in better memory performance. One major confound in the extant literature is that most EL studies have not controlled for the number of errors made during TEL, resulting in a large variability in the amount of errors committed. This variability likely explains why studies on the cognitive underpinnings of EL and TEL have produced mixed findings. In this study, a novel object-location learning task was employed to examine EL and TEL in 30 healthy young adults. The number of errors was systematically manipulated, allowing us to investigate the impact of frequency of errors on learning outcome. The results showed that recall from memory was significantly better during EL. However, the number of errors made during TEL did not influence the performance in young adults. Altogether, our novel paradigm is promising for measuring EL and TEL, allowing for more accurate analyses to understand the impact of error frequency on a person's learning ability and style.

Reinforcement learning in child molesters.

BACKGROUND: Child molesters form a heterogeneous group, but one generally shared characteristic is maladaptive, rigid behaviour. Impairments in reinforcement learning may explain these maladaptive tendencies, but this has not been systematically investigated. Further, it is not known if such impairments vary with subtype of child molesters. AIMS: To investigate the presence of impairments in reinforcement learning among child molesters and to test for differences in patterns of impairment with subtype. METHODS: A group of 59 child molesters was recruited from several prisons in a two-stage screening process, the first using records and the second interview; a comparison group of 33 offenders who had never committed a sex offence and who denied paedophile ideation was similarly recruited; 36 nonoffender comparison men were recruited by social media and word of mouth. Each was asked to perform a probabilistic reversal learning task, in which stimulus-outcome contingencies had to be learned. RESULTS: Child molesters, as a group, made significantly more errors on the probabilistic reversal learning task than the nonoffenders; the comparison offenders and the nonoffenders gained similar scores, although findings may have been confounded by older age in the child molester group. Nonpaedophilic child molesters had significantly worse scores than paedophilic child molesters. CONCLUSIONS: Child molesters, especially those not diagnosed with paedophilia, have deficits during both the acquisition and reversal of contingencies, suggesting reinforcement learning deficits that may undermine their capacity to benefit maximally from therapy without preliminary work to repair those deficits, possibly in conjunction with extending the offender programmes. Testing before programme entry would enable accurate targeting of scarce resources in this respect.

Why would anyone want to believe in Big Gods?

We suggest an alternative explanation for the emergence of Big Gods that places less emphasis on the role of cognitive tendencies and selection of prosocial cultural variants. Instead, we argue that the fundamental motivation to reduce uncertainty and increase long-term predictability provides a better account for the rise of Big moralizing Gods in a complex and heavily regulated social environment.

Enhancing Within-Person Estimation of Neurocognition and the Prediction of Externalizing Behaviors in Adolescents.

Decades of research document an association between neurocognitive dysfunction and externalizing behaviors, including rule-breaking, aggression, and impulsivity. However, there has been very little work that examines how multiple neurocognitive functions co-occur within individuals and which combinations of neurocognitive functions are most relevant for externalizing behaviors. Moreover, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), a widely used method for grouping individuals in person-centered analysis, often struggles to balance the tradeoff between good model fit (splitting participants into many latent profiles) and model interpretability (using only a few, highly distinct latent profiles). To address these problems, we implemented a non-parametric Bayesian form of LPA based on the Dirichlet process mixture model (DPM-LPA) and used it to study the relationship between neurocognitive functioning and externalizing behaviors in adolescents participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. First, we found that DPM-LPA outperformed conventional LPA, revealing more distinct profiles and classifying participants with higher certainty. Second, latent profiles extracted from DPM-LPA were differentially related to externalizing behaviors: profiles with deficits in working memory, inhibition, and/or language abilities were robustly related to different expressions of externalizing. Together, these findings represent a step towards addressing the challenge of finding novel ways to use neurocognitive data to better describe the individual. By precisely identifying and specifying the variation in neurocognitive and behavioral patterns this work offers an innovative empirical foundation for the development of assessments and interventions that address these costly behaviors.

Learning capacity in early-stage Alzheimer's disease: The role of feedback during learning on memory performance.

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by a decline in episodic memory and executive functioning, hampering learning ability. Insight into outcome-based learning capacity may be relevant for optimizing the learning potential of these patients. To date, mixed results have been found in studies in which cognitively impaired participants have to learn based on positive and negative outcomes. In this study, we investigated the role of negative and positive feedback on memory performance and participants' ability to adjust their behaviour accordingly in a sample of 23 early-stage AD patients and 23 matched healthy controls. We administered a novel computerized object-location memory task, in which participants were instructed to learn and memorize the locations of different everyday objects following errorless learning (EL) and trial-and-error learning (TEL). A separate probabilistic TEL task was employed in which participants had to learn how to adjust their behaviour based on positive and negative feedback. EL had a beneficial general effect on memory performance for object locations. However, this effect was not larger in early-stage AD patients compared to controls and error frequency during acquisition of object locations was unrelated to later recall performance. No group differences were found on the probabilistic learning task with respect to learning performance over time and based on positive and negative feedback. Although the error monitoring system seems intact in patients with early-stage AD, errors during learning are likely acting as a source of interference causing difficulty in storage or retrieval of object locations.

Impaired Punishment Learning in Conduct Disorder.

OBJECTIVE: Conduct disorder (CD) has been associated with deficits in the use of punishment to guide reinforcement learning (RL) and decision making. This may explain the poorly planned and often impulsive antisocial and aggressive behavior in affected youths. Here, we used a computational modeling approach to examine differences in RL abilities between CD youths and typically developing controls (TDCs). Specifically, we tested 2 competing hypotheses that RL deficits in CD reflect either reward dominance (also known as reward hypersensitivity) or punishment insensitivity (also known as punishment hyposensitivity). METHOD: The study included 92 CD youths and 130 TDCs (aged 9-18 years, 48% girls) who completed a probabilistic RL task with reward, punishment, and neutral contingencies. Using computational modeling, we investigated the extent to which the 2 groups differed in their learning abilities to obtain reward and/or to avoid punishment. RESULTS: RL model comparisons showed that a model with separate learning rates per contingency explained behavioral performance best. Importantly, CD youths showed lower learning rates than TDCs specifically for punishment, whereas learning rates for reward and neutral contingencies did not differ. Moreover, callous-unemotional (CU) traits did not correlate with learning rates in CD. CONCLUSION: CD youths have a highly selective impairment in probabilistic punishment learning, regardless of their CU traits, whereas reward learning appears to be intact. In summary, our data suggest punishment insensitivity rather than reward dominance in CD. Clinically, the use of punishment-based intervention techniques to achieve effective discipline in patients with CD may be a less helpful strategy than reward-based techniques.

Reversal deficits in individuals with psychopathy in explicit but not implicit learning conditions.

BACKGROUND: Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder that has been linked to impaired behavioural adaptation during reinforcement learning. Recent electrophysiological studies have suggested that psychopathy is related to impairments in intentionally using information relevant for adapting behaviour, whereas these impairments remain absent for behaviour relying on automatic use of information. We sought to investigate whether previously found impairments in response reversal in individuals with psychopathy also follow this dichotomy. We expected response reversal to be intact when the automatic use of information was facilitated. In contrast, we expected impaired response reversal when intentional use of information was required. METHODS: We included offenders with psychopathy and matched healthy controls in 2 experiments with a probabilistic cued go/no-go reaction time task. The task implicated the learning and reversal of 2 predictive contingencies. In experiment 1, participants were not informed about the inclusion of a learning component, thus making cue-dependent learning automatic/incidental. In experiment 2, the instructions required participants to actively monitor and learn predictive relationships, giving learning a controlled/intentional nature. RESULTS: While there were no significant group differences in acquisition learning in either experiment, the results revealed impaired response reversal in offenders with psychopathy when controlled learning was facilitated. Interestingly, this impairment was absent when automatic learning was predominant. LIMITATIONS: Possible limitations are the use of a nonforensic control group and of self-report measures for drug use. CONCLUSION: Response reversal deficits in individuals with psychopathy are modulated by the context provided by the instructions, according to the distinction between automatic and controlled processing in these individuals.

Social-affective functioning and learning in psychopathy.

Psychopathy is a personality construct for which impairments in multiple aspects of social and affective functioning are considered to be central. Individuals with elevated levels of psychopathic traits tend to exhibit maladaptive behaviors that are harmful to themselves and others, and seem to be limited in how they perceive and experience affective states. This chapter provides a brief overview of biopsychological theories and studies of psychopathy targeting impairments in affective processing and behavioral adaptation through learning. Also, current gaps in the literature will be discussed in addition to findings highlighting the need to routinely reexamine the validity and robustness of decades-old views on psychopathy in the light of recent multidisciplinary empirical research. The chapter ends with a short reflection on how alternative views may offer novel insights that may bring significant advances in the study of the biopsychological factors underlying psychopathy.

Distinct neurocognitive fingerprints reflect differential associations with risky and impulsive behavior in a neurotypical sample.

Engagement in risky and impulsive behavior has long been associated with deficits in neurocognition. However, we have a limited understanding of how multiple subfunctions of neurocognition co-occur within individuals and which combinations of neurocognitive subfunctions are most relevant for risky and impulsive behavior. Using the neurotypical Nathan Kline Institute Rockland Sample (N = 673), we applied a Bayesian latent feature learning model-the Indian Buffet Process-to identify nuanced, individual-specific profiles of multiple neurocognitive subfunctions and examine their relationship to risky and impulsive behavior. All features were within a relatively normative range of neurocognition; however, there was subtle variability related to risky and impulsive behaviors. The relatively overall poorer neurocognition feature correlated with greater affective impulsivity and substance use patterns/problems. The poorer episodic memory and emotion feature correlated with greater trait externalizing and sensation-seeking. The poorer attention feature correlated with increased trait externalizing and negative urgency but decreased positive urgency and substance use. Finally, the average or mixed features negatively correlated with various risky and impulsive behaviors. Estimating nuanced patterns of co-occurring neurocognitive functions can inform our understanding of a continuum of risky and impulsive behaviors.

Classifying Conduct Disorder Using a Biopsychosocial Model and Machine Learning Method.

BACKGROUND: Conduct disorder (CD) is a common syndrome with far-reaching effects. Risk factors for the development of CD span social, psychological, and biological domains. Researchers note that predictive models of CD are limited if the focus is on a single risk factor or even a single domain. Machine learning methods are optimized for the extraction of trends across multidomain data but have yet to be implemented in predicting the development of CD. METHODS: Social (e.g., family, income), psychological (e.g., psychiatric, neuropsychological), and biological (e.g., resting-state graph metrics) risk factors were measured using data from the baseline visit of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study when youth were 9 to 10 years old (N = 2368). Applying a feed-forward neural network machine learning method, risk factors were used to predict CD diagnoses 2 years later. RESULTS: A model with factors that included social, psychological, and biological domains outperformed models representing factors within any single domain, predicting the presence of a CD diagnosis with 91.18% accuracy. Within each domain, certain factors stood out in terms of their relationship to CD (social: lower parental monitoring, more aggression in the household, lower income; psychological: greater attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder symptoms, worse crystallized cognition and card sorting performance; biological: disruptions in the topology of subcortical and frontoparietal networks). CONCLUSIONS: The development of an accurate, sensitive, and specific predictive model of CD has the potential to aid in prevention and intervention efforts. Key risk factors for CD appear best characterized as reflecting unpredictable, impulsive, deprived, and emotional external and internal contexts.

Game-supported cognitive strategy training for slowed information processing speed after acquired brain injury: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

INTRODUCTION: Many individuals with acquired brain injury tend to experience problems with slowed information processing speed (IPS). A potentially beneficial and cost-effective supplement for cognitive rehabilitation of impaired IPS may be the implementation of serious gaming that focuses on compensatory learning as part of cognitive training. However, most digital platforms used during cognitive rehabilitation focus on restoring cognitive function and evidence for skill transfer from digital practice to everyday life is lacking. This study aims to investigate the efficacy of a game-supported cognitive strategy training. The training combines a well-validated time pressure management cognitive strategy training, targeting slowed IPS, with a novel game and a mobile application. The game-supported training focuses on the generalisation of strategy-use to untrained tasks in everyday life. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The study is designed as a randomised controlled trial in which the experimental group (Karman Line - Tempo module: an 8-week game-supported cognitive strategy training) will be compared with an active control group (CogniPlus training: an 8-week computerised cognitive function training). Data from 60 individuals with acquired brain injury (30 per group, ages between 16 and 75) will be collected at baseline (T0), post-treatment (T1) and at 3-month follow-up (T2). The primary outcome measure is an objective assessment of compensatory strategy use in an untrained experimental task. The secondary outcome is the attainment of trained and untrained treatment goals assessed by goal attainment scaling. Pre-training and post-training data will be analysed using a 2×2 repeated measure analysis of variance. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This study has been approved by the medical review ethics committee CMO Region Arnhem and Nijmegen (NL74818.091.20) and is registered in the Netherlands Trial Register. Research findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at conferences. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NL9437; The Netherlands Trial Register.

Aggressive and psychopathic traits are linked to the acquisition of stable but imprecise hostile expectations.

Individuals with hostile expectations (HEX) anticipate harm from seemingly neutral or ambiguous stimuli. However, it is unclear how HEX are acquired, and whether specific components of HEX learning can predict antisocial thought, conduct, and personality. In an online sample of healthy young individuals (n = 256, 69% women), we administered a virtual shooting task and applied computational modelling of behaviour to investigate HEX learning and its constellation of correlates. HEX acquisition was best explained by a hierarchical reinforcement learning mechanism. Crucially, we found that individuals with relatively higher self-reported aggressiveness and psychopathy developed stronger and less accurate hostile beliefs as well as larger prediction errors. Moreover, aggressive and psychopathic traits were associated with more temporally stable hostility representations. Our study thus shows that aggressiveness and psychopathy are linked with the acquisition of robust yet imprecise hostile beliefs through reinforcement learning.

Action initiation and punishment learning differ from childhood to adolescence while reward learning remains stable.

Theoretical and empirical accounts suggest that adolescence is associated with heightened reward learning and impulsivity. Experimental tasks and computational models that can dissociate reward learning from the tendency to initiate actions impulsively (action initiation bias) are thus critical to characterise the mechanisms that drive developmental differences. However, existing work has rarely quantified both learning ability and action initiation, or it has relied on small samples. Here, using computational modelling of a learning task collected from a large sample (N = 742, 9-18 years, 11 countries), we test differences in reward and punishment learning and action initiation from childhood to adolescence. Computational modelling reveals that whilst punishment learning rates increase with age, reward learning remains stable. In parallel, action initiation biases decrease with age. Results are similar when considering pubertal stage instead of chronological age. We conclude that heightened reward responsivity in adolescence can reflect differences in action initiation rather than enhanced reward learning.

The Societal Response to Psychopathy in the Community.

The harm usually associated with psychopathy requires therapeutically, legally, and ethically satisfactory solutions. Scholars from different fields have, thus, examined whether empirical evidence shows that individuals with psychopathic traits satisfy concepts, such as responsibility, mental disorder, or disability, that have specific legal or ethical implications. The present paper considers the less discussed issue of whether psychopathy is a disability. As it has been shown for the cases of the responsibility and mental disorder status of psychopathic individuals, we argue that it is undecided whether psychopathy is a disability. Nonetheless, based on insights from disability studies and legislations, we propose that interventions to directly modify the propensities of individuals with psychopathic tendencies should be balanced with modifications of the social and physical environments to accommodate their peculiarities. We also suggest how this social approach in some practical contexts that involve non-offender populations might be effective in addressing some of the negative effects of psychopathy.

The importance of an exaggerated attention bottleneck for understanding psychopathy.

The psychopath has long captured the imagination. A name such as Ted Bundy evokes a morbid curiosity. The crimes committed by Bundy are so cruel that it is hard to imagine how someone could do such things. In this review we discuss evidence that exaggeration in an attention bottleneck is one mechanism that makes it possible for psychopathic individuals to be adept at focusing on a single stimulus feature or goal but struggle to process multiple streams of information simultaneously. This exaggeration may partly explain the behavioral, affective, and social deficits that are apparent among psychopathic individuals. Further research on this attentional mechanism may promote a science that adequately captures the complexity of psychopathic behavior and offers new avenues for intervention.

Own Pain Distress Mediates the Link Between the Lifestyle Facet of Psychopathy and Estimates of Pain Distress in Others.

Psychopathy is a multifaceted personality construct entailing interpersonal-affective disturbances, antisocial traits, and a tendency to lead an erratic lifestyle. Elevated levels of psychopathic traits have been linked to having an altered experience of pain, reduced responsivity to distress in others, and making poor moral choices that bring harm to others. In the context of moral decision-making, it is possible that the capacity to estimate the distress felt by others is linked to a limitation in the first-hand experience of distress, as the presence of psychopathic traits increases. We employed a model-based approach in a non-offender sample (n = 174) to investigate whether pain-related distress mediated the links between facets of psychopathy and estimates of the pain distress potentially experienced by others. Participants judged the permissibility of moral dilemmas and rated how much pain distress they would experience while making such judgements, as well as how much pain distress they believed the "victims" would feel as a result of the moral choice made by the participant. We found that ratings of own pain distress predicted beliefs about the distress others may experience, and elevated scores on the lifestyle facet of psychopathy uniquely predicted lower estimates of own pain distress. Furthermore, own pain distress mediated the relationship between the lifestyle facet and beliefs about others' distress. Finally, exploratory zero-order correlation analyses revealed that ratings of own pain distress decreased as the scores on multiple psychopathic traits increased. Only the lifestyle facet correlated in the negative direction with beliefs about others' distress. Taken together, our findings suggest that beliefs about how much pain distress others may experience is indeed mediated by own pain distress, and that the tendency to lead an erratic lifestyle is linked to alterations in this mechanism.