Belief Updating during Social Interactions: Neural Dynamics and Causal Role of Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex.

In competitive interactions, humans have to flexibly update their beliefs about another person's intentions in order to adjust their own choice strategy, such as when believing that the other may exploit their cooperativeness. Here we investigate both the neural dynamics and the causal neural substrate of belief updating processes in humans. We used an adapted prisoner's dilemma game in which participants explicitly predicted the coplayer's actions, which allowed us to quantify the prediction error between expected and actual behavior. First, in an EEG experiment, we found a stronger medial frontal negativity (MFN) for negative than positive prediction errors, suggesting that this medial frontal ERP component may encode unexpected defection of the coplayer. The MFN also predicted subsequent belief updating after negative prediction errors. In a second experiment, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate whether the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) causally implements belief updating after unexpected outcomes. Our results show that dmPFC TMS impaired belief updating and strategic behavioral adjustments after negative prediction errors. Taken together, our findings reveal the time course of the use of prediction errors in social decisions and suggest that the dmPFC plays a crucial role in updating mental representations of others' intentions.

Different learning aberrations relate to delusion-like beliefs with different contents.

The prediction error account of delusions has had success. However, its explanation of delusions with different contents has been lacking. Persecutory delusions and paranoia are the common unfounded beliefs that others have harmful intentions towards us. Other delusions include believing that one's thoughts or actions are under external control or that events in the world have specific personal meaning. We compare learning in two different cognitive tasks, probabilistic reversal learning and Kamin blocking, that have relationships to paranoid and non-paranoid delusion-like beliefs, respectively. We find that clinical high-risk status alone does not result in different behavioural results in the probabilistic reversal learning task but that an individual's level of paranoia is associated with excessive switching behaviour. During the Kamin blocking task, paranoid individuals learned inappropriately about the blocked cue. However, they also had decreased learning about the control cue, suggesting more general learning impairments. Non-paranoid delusion-like belief conviction (but not paranoia) was associated with aberrant learning about the blocked cue but intact learning about the control cue, suggesting specific impairments in learning related to cue combination. We fit task-specific computational models separately to behavioural data to explore how latent parameters vary within individuals between tasks and how they can explain symptom-specific effects. We find that paranoia is associated with low learning rates in the probabilistic reversal learning task and the blocking task. Non-paranoid delusion-like belief conviction is instead related to parameters controlling the degree and direction of similarity between cue updating during simultaneous cue presentation. These results suggest that paranoia and other delusion-like beliefs involve dissociable deficits in learning and belief updating, which, given the transdiagnostic status of paranoia, might have differential utility in predicting psychosis.

Can Invalid Information Be Ignored When It Is Detected?

With the rapid spread of information via social media, individuals are prone to misinformation exposure that they may utilize when forming beliefs. Over five experiments (total N = 815 adults, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States), we investigated whether people could ignore quantitative information when they judged for themselves that it was misreported. Participants recruited online viewed sets of values sampled from Gaussian distributions to estimate the underlying means. They attempted to ignore invalid information, which were outlier values inserted into the value sequences. Results indicated participants were able to detect outliers. Nevertheless, participants' estimates were still biased in the direction of the outlier, even when they were most certain that they detected invalid information. The addition of visual warning cues and different task scenarios did not fully eliminate systematic over- and underestimation. These findings suggest that individuals may incorporate invalid information they meant to ignore when forming beliefs.

Temporal stability of Bayesian belief updating in perceptual decision-making.

Bayesian inference suggests that perception is inferred from a weighted integration of prior contextual beliefs with current sensory evidence (likelihood) about the world around us. The perceived precision or uncertainty associated with prior and likelihood information is used to guide perceptual decision-making, such that more weight is placed on the source of information with greater precision. This provides a framework for understanding a spectrum of clinical transdiagnostic symptoms associated with aberrant perception, as well as individual differences in the general population. While behavioral paradigms are commonly used to characterize individual differences in perception as a stable characteristic, measurement reliability in these behavioral tasks is rarely assessed. To remedy this gap, we empirically evaluate the reliability of a perceptual decision-making task that quantifies individual differences in Bayesian belief updating in terms of the relative precision weighting afforded to prior and likelihood information (i.e., sensory weight). We analyzed data from participants (n = 37) who performed this task twice. We found that the precision afforded to prior and likelihood information showed high internal consistency and good test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.73, 95% CI [0.53, 0.85]) when averaged across participants, as well as at the individual level using hierarchical modeling. Our results provide support for the assumption that Bayesian belief updating operates as a stable characteristic in perceptual decision-making. We discuss the utility and applicability of reliable perceptual decision-making paradigms as a measure of individual differences in the general population, as well as a diagnostic tool in psychiatric research.

Updating Contextual Sensory Expectations for Adaptive Behavior.

The brain has the extraordinary capacity to construct predictive models of the environment by internalizing statistical regularities in the sensory inputs. The resulting sensory expectations shape how we perceive and react to the world; at the neural level, this relates to decreased neural responses to expected than unexpected stimuli ("expectation suppression"). Crucially, expectations may need revision as context changes. However, existing research has often neglected this issue. Further, it is unclear whether contextual revisions apply selectively to expectations relevant to the task at hand, hence serving adaptive behavior. The present fMRI study examined how contextual visual expectations spread throughout the cortical hierarchy as we update our beliefs. We created a volatile environment: two alternating contexts contained different sequences of object images, thereby producing context-dependent expectations that needed revision when the context changed. Human participants of both sexes attended a training session before scanning to learn the contextual sequences. The fMRI experiment then tested for the emergence of contextual expectation suppression in two separate tasks, respectively, with task-relevant and task-irrelevant expectations. Effects of contextual expectation emerged progressively across the cortical hierarchy as participants attuned themselves to the context: expectation suppression appeared first in the insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and posterior parietal cortex, followed by the ventral visual stream, up to early visual cortex. This applied selectively to task-relevant expectations. Together, the present results suggest that an insular and frontoparietal executive control network may guide the flexible deployment of contextual sensory expectations for adaptive behavior in our complex and dynamic world.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The world is structured by statistical regularities, which we use to predict the future. This is often accompanied by suppressed neural responses to expected compared with unexpected events ("expectation suppression"). Crucially, the world is also highly volatile and context-dependent: expected events may become unexpected when the context changes, thus raising the crucial need for belief updating. However, this issue has generally been neglected. By setting up a volatile environment, we show that expectation suppression emerges first in executive control regions, followed by relevant sensory areas, only when observers use their expectations to optimize behavior. This provides surprising yet clear evidence on how the brain controls the updating of sensory expectations for adaptive behavior in our ever-changing world.

Aberrant uncertainty processing is linked to psychotic-like experiences, autistic traits, and is reflected in pupil dilation during probabilistic learning.

Aberrant belief updating due to misestimation of uncertainty and an increased perception of the world as volatile (i.e., unstable) has been found in autism and psychotic disorders. Pupil dilation tracks events that warrant belief updating, likely reflecting the adjustment of neural gain. However, whether subclinical autistic or psychotic symptoms affect this adjustment and how they relate to learning in volatile environments remains to be unraveled. We investigated the relationship between behavioral and pupillometric markers of subjective volatility (i.e., experience of the world as unstable), autistic traits, and psychotic-like experiences in 52 neurotypical adults with a probabilistic reversal learning task. Computational modeling revealed that participants with higher psychotic-like experience scores overestimated volatility in low-volatile task periods. This was not the case for participants scoring high on autistic-like traits, who instead showed a diminished adaptation of choice-switching behavior in response to risk. Pupillometric data indicated that individuals with higher autistic- or psychotic-like trait and experience scores differentiated less between events that warrant belief updating and those that do not when volatility was high. These findings are in line with misestimation of uncertainty accounts of psychosis and autism spectrum disorders and indicate that aberrancies are already present at the subclinical level.

How negative mood hinders belief updating in depression: results from two experimental studies.

BACKGROUND: In two experimental studies, we tested the hypothesis that negative mood would hinder the revision of negative beliefs in response to unexpectedly positive information in depression, whereas positive mood was expected to enhance belief updating. METHODS: In study 1 (N = 101), we used a subclinical sample to compare the film-based induction of sad v. happy mood with a distraction control group. Subsequently, participants underwent a well-established paradigm to examine intra-individual changes in performance-related expectations after unexpectedly positive performance feedback. In study 2, we applied the belief-updating task from study 1 to an inpatient sample (N = 81) and induced sad v. happy mood via film-clips v. recall of autobiographic events. RESULTS: The results of study 1 showed no significant group differences in belief updating; the severity of depressive symptoms was a negative predictor of belief revision, though, and there was a non-significant trend suggesting that the presence of sad mood hindered belief updating in the subgroup of participants with a diagnosed depressive episode. Study 2 revealed that participants updated their expectations significantly less in line with positive feedback when they underwent the induction of negative mood prior to feedback, relative to positive mood. CONCLUSIONS: By indicating that the presence of negative mood can hinder the revision of negative beliefs in clinically depressed people, our findings suggest that learning from new experiences can be hampered if state negative mood is activated. Thus, interventions relying on learning from novel positive experiences should aim at reducing state negative mood in depression.

Aberrant adapting of beliefs under stress: a mechanism relevant to the formation of paranoia?

BACKGROUND: Difficulties in the ability to adapt beliefs in the face of new information are associated with psychosis and its central symptom - paranoia. As cognitive processes and psychotic symptoms are both known to be sensitive to stress, the present study investigated the exact associations between stress, adapting of beliefs [reversal learning (RL), bias against disconfirmatory evidence (BADE), and jumping to conclusions (JTC)] and paranoia. We hypothesized that paranoia would increase under stress and that difficulties in adapting of beliefs would mediate or moderate the link between stress and paranoia. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the investigated effects would be strongest in the group of individuals diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. METHODS: We exposed 155 participants (38 diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, 40 individuals with attenuated psychotic symptoms, 39 clinical controls diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and 38 healthy controls) to a control condition and a stress condition, in which we assessed their levels of paranoia and their ability to adapt beliefs. We applied multilevel models to analyze the data. RESULTS: Paranoia was higher in the stress condition than in the control condition, b = 1.142, s.e. = 0.338, t(150) = 3.381, p < 0.001. RL, BADE, and JTC did not differ between conditions and did not mediate or moderate the association between stress and paranoia (all ps > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The results support the assumption that stress triggers paranoia. However, the link between stress and paranoia does not seem to be affected by the ability to adapt beliefs.

Resilience of primal world beliefs to the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.

INTRODUCTION: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior, and mental health. How such beliefs form or change across the lifespan is largely unknown, although theory suggests that beliefs become more negative after disruptive events. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to test whether dramatic world changes and personal adversity affect beliefs. METHOD: In a longitudinal, quasi-experimental, pre-registered design, 529 US participants (51% female, 76% White) provided ratings of primals before and several months after pandemic onset, and information about personal adversity (e.g., losing family, financial hardship). Data were compared to 398 participants without experience of the pandemic. RESULTS: The average person in our sample showed no change in 23 of the 26 primals, including Safe, in response to the early pandemic, and only saw the world as slightly less Alive, Interactive, and Acceptable. Higher adversity, however, was associated with slight declines in some beliefs. One limitation is that participants were exclusively American. CONCLUSION: Primals were remarkably stable during the initial shock wrought by a once-in-a-century pandemic, supporting a view of primals as stable lenses through which people interpret the world.

A Bayesian model of the jumping-to-conclusions bias and its relationship to psychopathology.

The mechanisms by which delusion and anxiety affect the tendency to make hasty decisions (Jumping-to-Conclusions bias) remain unclear. This paper proposes a Bayesian computational model that explores the assignment of evidence weights as a potential explanation of the Jumping-to-Conclusions bias using the Beads Task. We also investigate the Beads Task as a repeated measure by varying the key aspects of the paradigm. The Bayesian model estimations from two online studies showed that higher delusional ideation promoted reduced belief updating but the impact of general and social anxiety on evidence weighting was inconsistent. The altered evidence weighting as a result of a psychopathological trait appeared insufficient in contributing to the Jumping-to-Conclusions bias. Variations in Beads Task aspects significantly affected subjective certainty at the point of decisions but not the number of draws to decisions. Repetitions of the Beads Task are feasible if one assesses the Jumping-to-Conclusions bias using number of draws to decisions.

Macroeconomic expectations and consumer sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of others' beliefs.

This paper investigates the effect of information about cross-country ratings of the government's and the public's reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic on consumers' macroeconomic expectations and sentiment. We conduct consumer surveys with randomized control trials (RCTs) in two waves in Thailand and Vietnam. The information treatments have the strongest effect when the information shown contradicts consumers' prior beliefs. In the first survey, conducted when the first lockdown was eased, treatment effects are stronger in Vietnam, causing more optimistic expectations and sentiment. In the second survey, conducted at the start of the second wave of infections, treatment effects are stronger in Thailand, causing a more pessimistic outlook.

Social influence in adolescence as a double-edged sword.

Social learning is fundamental to human development, helping individuals adapt to changing circumstances and cooperate in groups. During the formative years of adolescence, the social environment shapes people's socio-cognitive skills needed in adulthood. Although peer influence among adolescents is traditionally associated with risky and unruly conduct, with long-term negative effects on educational, economic and health outcomes, recent findings suggest that peers may also have a positive impact. Here, we present a series of experiments with 10-20-year-olds (n = 146) showing that positive and negative peer effects reflect a domain-general factor of social information use which declines during adolescence. Exposure to disobedient peers provoked rule breaking, and selfish peers reduced prosocial behaviour, particularly in early adolescence. However, compliant peers also promoted rule compliance and fair peers increased prosociality. A belief formation task further revealed that younger adolescents tend to assimilate social information, while older adolescents prioritize personal views. Our results highlight early adolescence as a key window for peer-based interventions to improve developmental trajectories.

How childhood maltreatment alters perception and cognition - the predictive processing account of borderline personality disorder.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe mental disorder, comprised of heterogeneous psychological and neurobiological pathologies. Here, we propose a predictive processing (PP) account of BPD to integrate these seemingly unrelated pathologies. In particular, we argue that the experience of childhood maltreatment, which is highly prevalent in BPD, leaves a developmental legacy with two facets: first, a coarse-grained, alexithymic model of self and others - leading to a rigidity and inflexibility concerning beliefs about self and others. Second, this developmental legacy leads to a loss of confidence or precision afforded beliefs about the consequences of social behavior. This results in an over reliance on sensory evidence and social feedback, with concomitant lability, impulsivity and hypersensitivity. In terms of PP, people with BPD show a distorted belief updating in response to new information with two opposing manifestations: rapid changes in beliefs and a lack of belief updating despite disconfirmatory evidence. This account of distorted information processing has the potential to explain both the instability (of affect, self-image, and interpersonal relationships) and the rigidity (of beliefs about self and others) which is typical of BPD. At the neurobiological level, we propose that enhanced levels of dopamine are associated with the increased integration of negative social feedback, and we also discuss the hypothesis of an impaired inhibitory control of the prefrontal cortex in the processing of negative social information. Our account may provide a new understanding not only of the clinical aspects of BPD, but also a unifying theory of the corresponding neurobiological pathologies. We conclude by outlining some directions for future research on the behavioral, neurobiological, and computational underpinnings of this model, and point to some clinical implications of it.

All or nothing belief updating in patients with schizophrenia reduces precision and flexibility of beliefs.

Schizophrenia is characterized by abnormal perceptions and beliefs, but the computational mechanisms through which these abnormalities emerge remain unclear. One prominent hypothesis asserts that such abnormalities result from overly precise representations of prior knowledge, which in turn lead beliefs to become insensitive to feedback. In contrast, another prominent hypothesis asserts that such abnormalities result from a tendency to interpret prediction errors as indicating meaningful change, leading to the assignment of aberrant salience to noisy or misleading information. Here we examine behaviour of patients and control subjects in a behavioural paradigm capable of adjudicating between these competing hypotheses and characterizing belief updates directly on individual trials. We show that patients are more prone to completely ignoring new information and perseverating on previous responses, but when they do update, tend to do so completely. This updating strategy limits the integration of information over time, reducing both the flexibility and precision of beliefs and provides a potential explanation for how patients could simultaneously show over-sensitivity and under-sensitivity to feedback in different paradigms.

Causal Role of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Belief Updating under Uncertainty.

Adaptive performance in uncertain environments depends on the ability to continuously update internal beliefs about environmental states. Recent correlative evidence suggests that a frontoparietal network including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) supports belief updating under uncertainty, but whether the dlPFC serves a "causal" role in this process is currently not clear. To elucidate its contribution, we leveraged transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right dlPFC, while 91 participants performed an incentivized belief-updating task. Participants also underwent a psychosocial stress or control manipulation to investigate the role of stress, which is known to modulate dlPFC functioning. We observed enhanced monetary value updating after anodal tDCS when it was normatively expected from a Bayesian perspective. A model-based analysis indicates that this effect was driven by belief updating. However, we also observed enhanced non-normative value updating, which might have been driven instead by expectancy violation. Enhanced normative and non-normative value updating reflected increased vs. decreased Bayesian rationality, respectively. Furthermore, cortisol increases were associated with enhanced positive, but not with negative, value updating. The present study thereby sheds light on the causal role of the right dlPFC in the remarkable human ability to navigate uncertain environments by continuously updating prior knowledge following new evidence.

Negative belief-updating bias for positive daily life events in individuals with schizophrenia and social anhedonia.

INTRODUCTION: Low-pleasure beliefs are found in both patients with schizophrenia (SZ) and individuals with high social anhedonia (SocAnh), and are associated with anhedonia. However, little is known about the development and maintenance of these low-pleasure beliefs in the clinical and subclinical populations. We investigated whether patients with SZ and individuals with high SocAnh have deficits in updating their beliefs, which may contribute to the understanding of the formation and maintenance of low-pleasure beliefs. METHODS: The Modified Belief Updating Task was administered to assess belief-updating patterns in a clinical sample (36 SZ patients and 30 matched controls) and a subclinical sample (27 individuals with high SocAnh and 30 matched controls). RESULTS: We found that compared with controls, SZ patients updated their beliefs to a greater extent and more frequently when receiving bad news for positive life events, but not for negative life events. Moreover, individuals with high SocAnh also exhibited similar patterns in updating their beliefs for positive life events after controlling depressive symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that negative belief-updating patterns for positive events may play an important role in the formation and maintenance of low-pleasure beliefs in patients with SZ and individuals with high SocAnh.

Expectation management of policy leaders: Evidence from COVID-19.

This paper studies how the communication of political leaders affects the expectation formation of the public. Specifically, we examine the expectation management of the German government regarding COVID-19-related regulatory measures during the early phase of the pandemic. We elicit beliefs about the duration of these restrictions via a high-frequency survey of individuals, accompanied by an additional survey of firms. To quantify the success of policy communication, we use a regression discontinuity design and study how beliefs about the duration of the regulatory measures changed in response to three nationally televised press conferences by former Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Prime Ministers of the German federal states. We find that the announcements of Angela Merkel and her colleagues significantly prolonged the expected duration of restrictions, with effects being strongest for individuals with higher ex-ante optimism.

Forming and updating vaccination beliefs: does the continued effect of misinformation depend on what we think we know?

People may cling to false facts even in the face of updated and correct information. The present study confronted misconceptions about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and a novel, fictitious Zika vaccine. Two experiments are reported, examining misconceptions as motivated by a poor risk understanding (Experiment 1, N = 130) or the exposure to conspiracy theories (Experiment 2, N = 130). Each experiment featured a Misinformation condition, wherein participants were presented with fictitious stories containing some misinformation (Experiment 1) and rumours focused on conspiracy theories (Experiment 2) that were later retracted by public health experts and a No misinformation condition, containing no reference to misinformation and rumours. Across experiments, participants were more hesitant towards vaccines when exposed to stories including vaccine misinformation. Notwithstanding, our results suggest a positive impact of a trusted source communicating the scientific consensus about vaccines. Zika virus represents a particular case showing how missing information can easily evolve into misinformation. Implications for effective dissemination of information are discussed.

[Ketamine Augmented Psychotherapy (KAP) in mood disorder: User guide]. / Psychothérapie augmentée par la kétamine (KAP) dans les troubles de l'humeur : mode d'emploi.

Ketamine, a non-competitive NMDA receptor antagonist, is used as a fast-acting antidepressant therapy in depressive disorders. This treatment provokes dissociative effects associating derealization and depersonalization, and a synaptogenic signaling cascade promoting brain plasticity. Despite several preliminary studies suggesting the usefulness of its combination with psychotherapy, administration of ketamine isn't generally combined with per- and post-infusion psychotherapy protocols in its clinical antidepressant use. However, the phenomenology of psychodysleptic experiences and the synaptogenic effect could potentiate cognitive and behavioral therapies (CBT). In this article, we purpose a practical protocol to Ketamine Augmented Psychotherapy (KAP) synthesizing contemporary data from the literature and our clinical experience. We detail proposals for clinical practice, and propose four important steps for the use of a psychodysleptic molecule for antidepressant purposes: preparation, administration, integration, and prolongation. Finally, we discuss the limits and prospects of this combination in the management of mood disorders.

[Belief updating and mood congruence in depressive disorder]. / Mise à jour des croyances et congruence à l'humeur dans le trouble dépressif.

Depressive disorder is characterized by a polymorphic symptomatology associating emotional, cognitive and behavioral disturbances. One of the most specific symptoms is negative beliefs, called congruent to mood. Despite the importance of these beliefs in the development, the maintenance, and the recurrence of depressive episodes, little is known about the processes underlying the generation of depressive beliefs. In this paper, we detail the link between belief updating mechanisms and the genesis of depressive beliefs. We show how depression alters information processing, generating cognitive immunization when processing positive information, affective updating bias related to the valence of belief and prediction error, and difficultie to disengage from negative information. We suggest that disruption of belief-updating mechanisms forms the basis of belief-mood congruence in depression.