TY - JOUR
T1 - The computational relationship between reinforcement learning, social inference, and paranoia
AU - Barnby, Joseph M.
AU - Mehta, Mitul A.
AU - Moutoussis, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
JMB was supported by the UK Medical Research Council (MR/N013700/1) and King’s College London member of the MRC Doctoral Training Partnership in Biomedical Sciences. MM is supported by the Wellcome Trust as a member of the ‘Neuroscience in Psychiatry Project’ (NSPN) which is funded by a Wellcome Strategic Award (ref 095844/7/11/Z). The Max Planck – UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing is a joint initiative of the Max Planck Society and UCL. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2022 Barnby et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2022/7/25
Y1 - 2022/7/25
N2 - Theoretical accounts suggest heightened uncertainty about the state of the world underpin aberrant belief updates, which in turn increase the risk of developing a persecutory delusion. However, this raises the question as to how an agent’s uncertainty may relate to the precise phenomenology of paranoia, as opposed to other qualitatively different forms of belief. We tested whether the same population (n = 693) responded similarly to non-social and social contingency changes in a probabilistic reversal learning task and a modified repeated reversal Dictator game, and the impact of paranoia on both. We fitted computational models that included closely related parameters that quantified the rigidity across contingency reversals and the uncertainty about the environment/partner. Consistent with prior work we show that paranoia was associated with uncertainty around a partner’s behavioural policy and rigidity in harmful intent attributions in the social task. In the non-social task we found that pre-existing paranoia was associated with larger decision temperatures and commitment to suboptimal cards. We show relationships between decision temperature in the non-social task and priors over harmful intent attributions and uncertainty over beliefs about partners in the social task. Our results converge across both classes of model, suggesting paranoia is associated with a general uncertainty over the state of the world (and agents within it) that takes longer to resolve, although we demonstrate that this uncertainty is expressed asymmetrically in social contexts. Our model and data allow the representation of sociocognitive mechanisms that explain persecutory delusions and provide testable, phenomenologically relevant predictions for causal experiments.
AB - Theoretical accounts suggest heightened uncertainty about the state of the world underpin aberrant belief updates, which in turn increase the risk of developing a persecutory delusion. However, this raises the question as to how an agent’s uncertainty may relate to the precise phenomenology of paranoia, as opposed to other qualitatively different forms of belief. We tested whether the same population (n = 693) responded similarly to non-social and social contingency changes in a probabilistic reversal learning task and a modified repeated reversal Dictator game, and the impact of paranoia on both. We fitted computational models that included closely related parameters that quantified the rigidity across contingency reversals and the uncertainty about the environment/partner. Consistent with prior work we show that paranoia was associated with uncertainty around a partner’s behavioural policy and rigidity in harmful intent attributions in the social task. In the non-social task we found that pre-existing paranoia was associated with larger decision temperatures and commitment to suboptimal cards. We show relationships between decision temperature in the non-social task and priors over harmful intent attributions and uncertainty over beliefs about partners in the social task. Our results converge across both classes of model, suggesting paranoia is associated with a general uncertainty over the state of the world (and agents within it) that takes longer to resolve, although we demonstrate that this uncertainty is expressed asymmetrically in social contexts. Our model and data allow the representation of sociocognitive mechanisms that explain persecutory delusions and provide testable, phenomenologically relevant predictions for causal experiments.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135372632&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010326
DO - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010326
M3 - Article
C2 - 35877675
AN - SCOPUS:85135372632
SN - 1553-734X
VL - 18
JO - PLoS Computational Biology
JF - PLoS Computational Biology
IS - 7
M1 - e1010326
ER -