Contextual influence of reinforcement learning performance of depression: evidence for a negativity bias?
Psychol Med
; 53(10): 4696-4706, 2023 07.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35726513
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUNDS Value-based decision-making impairment in depression is a complex phenomenon while some studies did find evidence of blunted reward learning and reward-related signals in the brain, others indicate no effect. Here we test whether such reward sensitivity deficits are dependent on the overall value of the decision problem. METHODS:
We used a two-armed bandit task with two different contexts one 'rich', one 'poor' where both options were associated with an overall positive, negative expected value, respectively. We tested patients (N = 30) undergoing a major depressive episode and age, gender and socio-economically matched controls (N = 26). Learning performance followed by a transfer phase, without feedback, were analyzed to distangle between a decision or a value-update process mechanism. Finally, we used computational model simulation and fitting to link behavioral patterns to learning biases.RESULTS:
Control subjects showed similar learning performance in the 'rich' and the 'poor' contexts, while patients displayed reduced learning in the 'poor' context. Analysis of the transfer phase showed that the context-dependent impairment in patients generalized, suggesting that the effect of depression has to be traced to the outcome encoding. Computational model-based results showed that patients displayed a higher learning rate for negative compared to positive outcomes (the opposite was true in controls).CONCLUSIONS:
Our results illustrate that reinforcement learning performances in depression depend on the value of the context. We show that depressive patients have a specific trouble in contexts with an overall negative state value, which in our task is consistent with a negativity bias at the learning rates level.Palavras-chave
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Depressão
/
Transtorno Depressivo Maior
Tipo de estudo:
Prognostic_studies
Limite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2023
Tipo de documento:
Article