Characterizing the dynamics, reactivity and controllability of moods in depression with a Kalman filter.

BACKGROUND: Mood disorders involve a complex interplay between multifaceted internal emotional states, and complex external inputs. Dynamical systems theory suggests that this interplay between aspects of moods and environmental stimuli may hence determine key psychopathological features of mood disorders, including the stability of mood states, the response to external inputs, how controllable mood states are, and what interventions are most likely to be effective. However, a comprehensive computational approach to all these aspects has not yet been undertaken. METHODS: Here, we argue that the combination of ecological momentary assessments (EMA) with a well-established dynamical systems framework-the humble Kalman filter-enables a comprehensive account of all these aspects. We first introduce the key features of the Kalman filter and optimal control theory and their relationship to aspects of psychopathology. We then examine the psychometric and inferential properties of combining EMA data with Kalman filtering across realistic scenarios. Finally, we apply the Kalman filter to a series of EMA datasets comprising over 700 participants with and without symptoms of depression. RESULTS: The results show a naive Kalman filter approach performs favourably compared to the standard vector autoregressive approach frequently employed, capturing key aspects of the data better. Furthermore, it suggests that the depressed state involves alterations to interactions between moods; alterations to how moods responds to external inputs; and as a result an alteration in how controllable mood states are. We replicate these findings qualitatively across datasets and explore an extension to optimal control theory to guide therapeutic interventions. CONCLUSIONS: Mood dynamics are richly and profoundly altered in depressed states. The humble Kalman filter is a well-established, rich framework to characterise mood dynamics. Its application to EMA data is valid; straightforward; and likely to result in substantial novel insights both into mechanisms and treatments.

A hierarchical reinforcement learning model explains individual differences in attentional set shifting.

Attentional set shifting refers to the ease with which the focus of attention is directed and switched. Cognitive tasks, such as the widely used CANTAB IED, reveal great variation in set shifting ability in the general population, with notable impairments in those with psychiatric diagnoses. The attentional and learning processes underlying this cognitive ability and how they lead to the observed variation remain unknown. To directly test this, we used a modelling approach on two independent large-scale online general-population samples performing CANTAB IED, with one including additional psychiatric symptom assessment. We found a hierarchical model that learnt both feature values and dimension attention best explained the data and that compulsive symptoms were associated with slower learning and higher attentional bias to the first relevant stimulus dimension. These data showcase a new methodology to analyse data from the CANTAB IED task, as well as suggest a possible mechanistic explanation for the variation in set shifting performance, and its relationship to compulsive symptoms.

The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor sertraline alters learning from aversive reinforcements in patients with depression: evidence from a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are first-line pharmacological treatments for depression and anxiety. However, little is known about how pharmacological action is related to cognitive and affective processes. Here, we examine whether specific reinforcement learning processes mediate the treatment effects of SSRIs. METHODS: The PANDA trial was a multicentre, double-blind, randomized clinical trial in UK primary care comparing the SSRI sertraline with placebo for depression and anxiety. Participants (N = 655) performed an affective Go/NoGo task three times during the trial and computational models were used to infer reinforcement learning processes. RESULTS: There was poor task performance: only 54% of the task runs were informative, with more informative task runs in the placebo than in the active group. There was no evidence for the preregistered hypothesis that Pavlovian inhibition was affected by sertraline. Exploratory analyses revealed that in the sertraline group, early increases in Pavlovian inhibition were associated with improvements in depression after 12 weeks. Furthermore, sertraline increased how fast participants learned from losses and faster learning from losses was associated with more severe generalized anxiety symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: The study findings indicate a relationship between aversive reinforcement learning mechanisms and aspects of depression, anxiety, and SSRI treatment, but these relationships did not align with the initial hypotheses. Poor task performance limits the interpretability and likely generalizability of the findings, and highlights the critical importance of developing acceptable and reliable tasks for use in clinical studies. FUNDING: This article presents research supported by NIHR Program Grants for Applied Research (RP-PG-0610-10048), the NIHR BRC, and UCL, with additional support from IMPRS COMP2PSYCH (JM, QH) and a Wellcome Trust grant (QH).

Depression: a decision-theoretic analysis.

The manifold symptoms of depression are common and often transient features of healthy life that are likely to be adaptive in difficult circumstances. It is when these symptoms enter a seemingly self-propelling spiral that the maladaptive features of a disorder emerge. We examine this malignant transformation from the perspective of the computational neuroscience of decision making, investigating how dysfunction of the brain's mechanisms of evaluation might lie at its heart. We start by considering the behavioral implications of pessimistic evaluations of decision variables. We then provide a selective review of work suggesting how such pessimism might arise via specific failures of the mechanisms of evaluation or state estimation. Finally, we analyze ways that miscalibration between the subject and environment may be self-perpetuating. We employ the formal framework of Bayesian decision theory as a foundation for this study, showing how most of the problems arise from one of its broad algorithmic facets, namely model-based reasoning.

Susceptibility to interference between Pavlovian and instrumental control predisposes risky alcohol use developmental trajectory from ages 18 to 24.

Pavlovian cues can influence ongoing instrumental behaviour via Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) processes. While appetitive Pavlovian cues tend to promote instrumental approach, they are detrimental when avoidance behaviour is required, and vice versa for aversive cues. We recently reported that susceptibility to interference between Pavlovian and instrumental control assessed via a PIT task was associated with risky alcohol use at age 18. We now investigated whether such susceptibility also predicts drinking trajectories until age 24, based on AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test) consumption and binge drinking (gramme alcohol/drinking occasion) scores. The interference PIT effect, assessed at ages 18 and 21 during fMRI, was characterized by increased error rates (ER) and enhanced neural responses in the ventral striatum (VS), the lateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices (dmPFC) during conflict, that is, when an instrumental approach was required in the presence of an aversive Pavlovian cue or vice versa. We found that a stronger VS response during conflict at age 18 was associated with a higher starting point of both drinking trajectories but predicted a decrease in binge drinking. At age 21, high ER and enhanced neural responses in the dmPFC were associated with increasing AUDIT-C scores over the next 3 years until age 24. Overall, susceptibility to interference between Pavlovian and instrumental control might be viewed as a predisposing mechanism towards hazardous alcohol use during young adulthood, and the identified high-risk group may profit from targeted interventions.

Explaining distortions in metacognition with an attractor network model of decision uncertainty.

Metacognition is the ability to reflect on, and evaluate, our cognition and behaviour. Distortions in metacognition are common in mental health disorders, though the neural underpinnings of such dysfunction are unknown. One reason for this is that models of key components of metacognition, such as decision confidence, are generally specified at an algorithmic or process level. While such models can be used to relate brain function to psychopathology, they are difficult to map to a neurobiological mechanism. Here, we develop a biologically-plausible model of decision uncertainty in an attempt to bridge this gap. We first relate the model's uncertainty in perceptual decisions to standard metrics of metacognition, namely mean confidence level (bias) and the accuracy of metacognitive judgments (sensitivity). We show that dissociable shifts in metacognition are associated with isolated disturbances at higher-order levels of a circuit associated with self-monitoring, akin to neuropsychological findings that highlight the detrimental effect of prefrontal brain lesions on metacognitive performance. Notably, we are able to account for empirical confidence judgements by fitting the parameters of our biophysical model to first-order performance data, specifically choice and response times. Lastly, in a reanalysis of existing data we show that self-reported mental health symptoms relate to disturbances in an uncertainty-monitoring component of the network. By bridging a gap between a biologically-plausible model of confidence formation and observed disturbances of metacognition in mental health disorders we provide a first step towards mapping theoretical constructs of metacognition onto dynamical models of decision uncertainty. In doing so, we provide a computational framework for modelling metacognitive performance in settings where access to explicit confidence reports is not possible.

Mortality Awareness: New Directions.

Thinking about our own death and its salience in relation to decision making has become a fruitful area of multidisciplinary research across the breadth of psychological science. By bringing together experts from philosophy, cognitive and affective neuroscience, clinical and computational psychiatry we have attempted to set out the current state of the art and point to areas of further enquiry. One stimulus for doing this is the need to engage with policy makers who are now having to consider guidelines on suicide and assisted suicide so that they may be aware of their own as well as the wider populations' cognitive processes when confronted with the ultimate truth of mortality.

A comparison of 'pruning' during multi-step planning in depressed and healthy individuals.

BACKGROUND: Real-life decisions are often complex because they involve making sequential choices that constrain future options. We have previously shown that to render such multi-step decisions manageable, people 'prune' (i.e. selectively disregard) branches of decision trees that contain negative outcomes. We have theorized that sub-optimal pruning contributes to depression by promoting an oversampling of branches that result in unsavoury outcomes, which results in a negatively-biased valuation of the world. However, no study has tested this theory in depressed individuals. METHODS: Thirty unmedicated depressed and 31 healthy participants were administered a sequential reinforcement-based decision-making task to determine pruning behaviours, and completed measures of depression and anxiety. Computational, Bayesian and frequentist analyses examined group differences in task performance and relationships between pruning and depressive symptoms. RESULTS: Consistent with prior findings, participants robustly pruned branches of decision trees that began with large losses, regardless of the potential utility of those branches. However, there was no group difference in pruning behaviours. Further, there was no relationship between pruning and levels of depression/anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: We found no evidence that sub-optimal pruning is evident in depression. Future research could determine whether maladaptive pruning behaviours are observable in specific sub-groups of depressed patients (e.g. in treatment-resistant individuals), or whether misuse of other heuristics may contribute to depression.

Susceptibility to interference between Pavlovian and instrumental control is associated with early hazardous alcohol use.

Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) tasks examine the influence of Pavlovian stimuli on ongoing instrumental behaviour. Previous studies reported associations between a strong PIT effect, high-risk drinking and alcohol use disorder. This study investigated whether susceptibility to interference between Pavlovian and instrumental control is linked to risky alcohol use in a community sample of 18-year-old male adults. Participants (N = 191) were instructed to 'collect good shells' and 'leave bad shells' during the presentation of appetitive (monetary reward), aversive (monetary loss) or neutral Pavlovian stimuli. We compared instrumental error rates (ER) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain responses between the congruent and incongruent conditions, as well as among high-risk and low-risk drinking groups. On average, individuals showed a substantial PIT effect, that is, increased ER when Pavlovian cues and instrumental stimuli were in conflict compared with congruent trials. Neural PIT correlates were found in the ventral striatum and the dorsomedial and lateral prefrontal cortices (lPFC). Importantly, high-risk drinking was associated with a stronger behavioural PIT effect, a decreased lPFC response and an increased neural response in the ventral striatum on the trend level. Moreover, high-risk drinkers showed weaker connectivity from the ventral striatum to the lPFC during incongruent trials. Our study links interference during PIT to drinking behaviour in healthy, young adults. High-risk drinkers showed higher susceptibility to Pavlovian cues, especially when they conflicted with instrumental behaviour, indicating lower interference control abilities. Increased activity in the ventral striatum (bottom-up), decreased lPFC response (top-down), and their altered interplay may contribute to poor interference control in the high-risk drinkers.

No substantial change in the balance between model-free and model-based control via training on the two-step task.

Human decisions can be habitual or goal-directed, also known as model-free (MF) or model-based (MB) control. Previous work suggests that the balance between the two decision systems is impaired in psychiatric disorders such as compulsion and addiction, via overreliance on MF control. However, little is known whether the balance can be altered through task training. Here, 20 healthy participants performed a well-established two-step task that differentiates MB from MF control, across five training sessions. We used computational modelling and functional near-infrared spectroscopy to assess changes in decision-making and brain hemodynamic over time. Mixed-effects modelling revealed overall no substantial changes in MF and MB behavior across training. Although our behavioral and brain findings show task-induced changes in learning rates, these parameters have no direct relation to either MF or MB control or the balance between the two systems, and thus do not support the assumption of training effects on MF or MB strategies. Our findings indicate that training on the two-step paradigm in its current form does not support a shift in the balance between MF and MB control. We discuss these results with respect to implications for restoring the balance between MF and MB control in psychiatric conditions.

Dysfunctional approach behavior triggered by alcohol-unrelated Pavlovian cues predicts long-term relapse in alcohol dependence.

We demonstrated that alcohol-dependent patients who relapsed within 1 year after detoxification showed stronger PIT effects compared with abstainers and controls. Relapsers particularly failed to correctly perform in trials where an instrumental stimulus required inhibition while a Pavlovian background cue indicated a monetary gain. Under that condition, relapsers approached the instrumental stimulus, independent of the expected punishment. The failure of inhibiting an aversive stimulus in favor of approaching an appetitive context cue reflects dysfunctional altered learning mechanisms in relapsers.

Opportunities for emotion and mental health research in the resource-rationality framework.

We discuss opportunities in applying the resource-rationality framework toward answering questions in emotion and mental health research. These opportunities rely on characterization of individual differences in cognitive strategies; an endeavor that may be at odds with the normative approach outlined in the target article. We consider ways individual differences might enter the framework and the translational opportunities offered by each.

Prefrontal glutamate levels predict altered amygdala-prefrontal connectivity in traumatized youths.

BACKGROUND: Neurobiological models of stress and stress-related mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder, converge on the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). While a surge of research has reported altered structural and functional connectivity between amygdala and the medial PFC following severe stress, few have addressed the underlying neurochemistry. METHODS: We combined resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging measures of amygdala connectivity with in vivo MR-spectroscopy (1H-MRS) measurements of glutamate in 26 survivors from the 2011 Norwegian terror attack and 34 control subjects. RESULTS: Traumatized youths showed altered amygdala-anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) and amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) connectivity. Moreover, the trauma survivors exhibited reduced levels of glutamate in the vmPFC which fits with the previous findings of reduced levels of Glx (glutamate + glutamine) in the aMCC (Ousdal et al., 2017) and together suggest long-term impact of a traumatic experience on glutamatergic pathways. Importantly, local glutamatergic metabolite levels predicted the individual amygdala-aMCC and amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity, and also mediated the observed group difference in amygdala-aMCC connectivity. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that traumatic stress may influence amygdala-prefrontal neuronal connectivity through an effect on prefrontal glutamate and its compounds. Understanding the neurochemical underpinning of altered amygdala connectivity after trauma may ultimately lead to the discovery of new pharmacological agents which can prevent or treat stress-related mental illness.

Personalized prediction of antidepressant v. placebo response: evidence from the EMBARC study.

BACKGROUND: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a highly heterogeneous condition in terms of symptom presentation and, likely, underlying pathophysiology. Accordingly, it is possible that only certain individuals with MDD are well-suited to antidepressants. A potentially fruitful approach to parsing this heterogeneity is to focus on promising endophenotypes of depression, such as neuroticism, anhedonia, and cognitive control deficits. METHODS: Within an 8-week multisite trial of sertraline v. placebo for depressed adults (n = 216), we examined whether the combination of machine learning with a Personalized Advantage Index (PAI) can generate individualized treatment recommendations on the basis of endophenotype profiles coupled with clinical and demographic characteristics. RESULTS: Five pre-treatment variables moderated treatment response. Higher depression severity and neuroticism, older age, less impairment in cognitive control, and being employed were each associated with better outcomes to sertraline than placebo. Across 1000 iterations of a 10-fold cross-validation, the PAI model predicted that 31% of the sample would exhibit a clinically meaningful advantage [post-treatment Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) difference ⩾3] with sertraline relative to placebo. Although there were no overall outcome differences between treatment groups (d = 0.15), those identified as optimally suited to sertraline at pre-treatment had better week 8 HRSD scores if randomized to sertraline (10.7) than placebo (14.7) (d = 0.58). CONCLUSIONS: A subset of MDD patients optimally suited to sertraline can be identified on the basis of pre-treatment characteristics. This model must be tested prospectively before it can be used to inform treatment selection. However, findings demonstrate the potential to improve individual outcomes through algorithm-guided treatment recommendations.

Deficits in context-dependent adaptive coding in early psychosis and healthy individuals with schizotypal personality traits.

Adaptive coding of information is a fundamental principle of brain functioning. It allows for efficient representation over a large range of inputs and thereby alleviates the limited coding range of neurons. In the present study, we investigated for the first time potential alterations in context-dependent reward adaptation and its association with symptom dimensions in the schizophrenia spectrum. We studied 27 patients with first-episode psychosis, 26 individuals with schizotypal personality traits and 25 healthy controls. We used functional MRI in combination with a variant of the monetary incentive delay task and assessed adaptive reward coding in two reward conditions with different reward ranges. Compared to healthy controls, patients with first-episode psychosis and healthy individuals with schizotypal personality traits showed a deficit in increasing the blood oxygen level-dependent response slope in the right caudate for the low reward range compared to the high reward range. In other words, the two groups showed inefficient neural adaptation to the current reward context. In addition, we found impaired adaptive coding of reward in the caudate nucleus and putamen to be associated with total symptom severity across the schizophrenia spectrum. Symptom severity was more strongly associated with neural deficits in adaptive coding than with the neural coding of absolute reward outcomes. Deficits in adaptive coding were prominent across the schizophrenia spectrum and even detectable in unmedicated (healthy) individuals with schizotypal personality traits. Furthermore, the association between total symptom severity and impaired adaptive coding in the right caudate and putamen suggests a dimensional mechanism underlying imprecise neural adaptation. Our findings support the idea that impaired adaptive coding may be a general information-processing deficit explaining disturbances within the schizophrenia spectrum over and above a simple model of blunted absolute reward signals.

Neural correlates of instrumental responding in the context of alcohol-related cues index disorder severity and relapse risk.

The influence of Pavlovian conditioned stimuli on ongoing behavior may contribute to explaining how alcohol cues stimulate drug seeking and intake. Using a Pavlovian-instrumental transfer task, we investigated the effects of alcohol-related cues on approach behavior (i.e., instrumental response behavior) and its neural correlates, and related both to the relapse after detoxification in alcohol-dependent patients. Thirty-one recently detoxified alcohol-dependent patients and 24 healthy controls underwent instrumental training, where approach or non-approach towards initially neutral stimuli was reinforced by monetary incentives. Approach behavior was tested during extinction with either alcohol-related or neutral stimuli (as Pavlovian cues) presented in the background during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Patients were subsequently followed up for 6 months. We observed that alcohol-related background stimuli inhibited the approach behavior in detoxified alcohol-dependent patients (t = - 3.86, p < .001), but not in healthy controls (t = - 0.92, p = .36). This behavioral inhibition was associated with neural activation in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) (t(30) = 2.06, p < .05). Interestingly, both the effects were only present in subsequent abstainers, but not relapsers and in those with mild but not severe dependence. Our data show that alcohol-related cues can acquire inhibitory behavioral features typical of aversive stimuli despite being accompanied by a stronger NAcc activation, suggesting salience attribution. The fact that these findings are restricted to abstinence and milder illness suggests that they may be potential resilience factors.Clinical trial: LeAD study, http://www.lead-studie.de , NCT01679145.

The Neural Basis of Aversive Pavlovian Guidance during Planning.

Important real-world decisions are often arduous as they frequently involve sequences of choices, with initial selections affecting future options. Evaluating every possible combination of choices is computationally intractable, particularly for longer multistep decisions. Therefore, humans frequently use heuristics to reduce the complexity of decisions. We recently used a goal-directed planning task to demonstrate the profound behavioral influence and ubiquity of one such shortcut, namely aversive pruning, a reflexive Pavlovian process that involves neglecting parts of the decision space residing beyond salient negative outcomes. However, how the brain implements this important decision heuristic and what underlies individual differences have hitherto remained unanswered. Therefore, we administered an adapted version of the same planning task to healthy male and female volunteers undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine the neural basis of aversive pruning. Through both computational and standard categorical fMRI analyses, we show that when planning was influenced by aversive pruning, the subgenual cingulate cortex was robustly recruited. This neural signature was distinct from those associated with general planning and valuation, two fundamental cognitive components elicited by our task but which are complementary to aversive pruning. Furthermore, we found that individual variation in levels of aversive pruning was associated with the responses of insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices to the receipt of large monetary losses, and also with subclinical levels of anxiety. In summary, our data reveal the neural signatures of an important reflexive Pavlovian process that shapes goal-directed evaluations and thereby determines the outcome of high-level sequential cognitive processes.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Multistep decisions are complex because initial choices constrain future options. Evaluating every path for long decision sequences is often impractical; thus, cognitive shortcuts are often essential. One pervasive and powerful heuristic is aversive pruning, in which potential decision-making avenues are curtailed at immediate negative outcomes. We used neuroimaging to examine how humans implement such pruning. We found it to be associated with activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex, with neural signatures that were distinguishable from those covarying with planning and valuation. Individual variations in aversive pruning levels related to subclinical anxiety levels and insular cortex activation. These findings reveal the neural mechanisms by which basic negative Pavlovian influences guide decision-making during planning, with implications for disrupted decision-making in psychiatric disorders.

No association of goal-directed and habitual control with alcohol consumption in young adults.

Alcohol dependence is a mental disorder that has been associated with an imbalance in behavioral control favoring model-free habitual over model-based goal-directed strategies. It is as yet unknown, however, whether such an imbalance reflects a predisposing vulnerability or results as a consequence of repeated and/or excessive alcohol exposure. We, therefore, examined the association of alcohol consumption with model-based goal-directed and model-free habitual control in 188 18-year-old social drinkers in a two-step sequential decision-making task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging before prolonged alcohol misuse could have led to severe neurobiological adaptations. Behaviorally, participants showed a mixture of model-free and model-based decision-making as observed previously. Measures of impulsivity were positively related to alcohol consumption. In contrast, neither model-free nor model-based decision weights nor the trade-off between them were associated with alcohol consumption. There were also no significant associations between alcohol consumption and neural correlates of model-free or model-based decision quantities in either ventral striatum or ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Exploratory whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging analyses with a lenient threshold revealed early onset of drinking to be associated with an enhanced representation of model-free reward prediction errors in the posterior putamen. These results suggest that an imbalance between model-based goal-directed and model-free habitual control might rather not be a trait marker of alcohol intake per se.

Interplay of approximate planning strategies.

Humans routinely formulate plans in domains so complex that even the most powerful computers are taxed. To do so, they seem to avail themselves of many strategies and heuristics that efficiently simplify, approximate, and hierarchically decompose hard tasks into simpler subtasks. Theoretical and cognitive research has revealed several such strategies; however, little is known about their establishment, interaction, and efficiency. Here, we use model-based behavioral analysis to provide a detailed examination of the performance of human subjects in a moderately deep planning task. We find that subjects exploit the structure of the domain to establish subgoals in a way that achieves a nearly maximal reduction in the cost of computing values of choices, but then combine partial searches with greedy local steps to solve subtasks, and maladaptively prune the decision trees of subtasks in a reflexive manner upon encountering salient losses. Subjects come idiosyncratically to favor particular sequences of actions to achieve subgoals, creating novel complex actions or "options."

Ventral striatal dopamine reflects behavioral and neural signatures of model-based control during sequential decision making.

Dual system theories suggest that behavioral control is parsed between a deliberative "model-based" and a more reflexive "model-free" system. A balance of control exerted by these systems is thought to be related to dopamine neurotransmission. However, in the absence of direct measures of human dopamine, it remains unknown whether this reflects a quantitative relation with dopamine either in the striatum or other brain areas. Using a sequential decision task performed during functional magnetic resonance imaging, combined with striatal measures of dopamine using [(18)F]DOPA positron emission tomography, we show that higher presynaptic ventral striatal dopamine levels were associated with a behavioral bias toward more model-based control. Higher presynaptic dopamine in ventral striatum was associated with greater coding of model-based signatures in lateral prefrontal cortex and diminished coding of model-free prediction errors in ventral striatum. Thus, interindividual variability in ventral striatal presynaptic dopamine reflects a balance in the behavioral expression and the neural signatures of model-free and model-based control. Our data provide a novel perspective on how alterations in presynaptic dopamine levels might be accompanied by a disruption of behavioral control as observed in aging or neuropsychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia and addiction.