Hauke, Daniel J;
Wobmann, Michelle;
Andreou, Christina;
Mackintosh, Amatya J;
de Bock, Renate;
Karvelis, Povilas;
Adams, Rick A;
... Diaconescu, Andreea O; + view all
(2024)
Altered Perception of Environmental Volatility During Social Learning in Emerging Psychosis.
Computational Psychiatry
, 8
(1)
pp. 1-22.
10.5334/cpsy.95.
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Abstract
Paranoid delusions or unfounded beliefs that others intend to deliberately cause harm are a frequent and burdensome symptom in early psychosis, but their emergence and consolidation still remains opaque. Recent theories suggest that overly precise prediction errors lead to an unstable model of the world providing a breeding ground for delusions. Here, we employ a Bayesian approach to test for such an unstable model of the world and investigate the computational mechanisms underlying emerging paranoia. We modelled behaviour of 18 first-episode psychosis patients (FEP), 19 individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR-P), and 19 healthy controls (HC) during an advice-taking task designed to probe learning about others’ changing intentions. We formulated competing hypotheses comparing the standard Hierarchical Gaussian Filter (HGF), a Bayesian belief updating scheme, with a mean-reverting HGF to model an altered perception of volatility. There was a significant group-by-volatility interaction on advice-taking suggesting that CHR-P and FEP displayed reduced adaptability to environmental volatility. Model comparison favored the standard HGF in HC, but the mean-reverting HGF in CHR-P and FEP in line with perceiving increased volatility, although model attributions in CHR-P were heterogeneous. We observed correlations between perceiving increased volatility and positive symptoms generally as well as with frequency of paranoid delusions specifically. Our results suggest that FEP are characterised by a different computational mechanism – perceiving the environment as increasingly volatile – in line with Bayesian accounts of psychosis. This approach may prove useful to investigate heterogeneity in CHR-P and identify vulnerability for transition to psychosis.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Altered Perception of Environmental Volatility During Social Learning in Emerging Psychosis |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.5334/cpsy.95 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.5334/cpsy.95 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | first-episode psychosis, clinical high risk for psychosis, paranoid delusions, Hierarchical Gaussian Filter, volatility, prediction errors |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry > Mental Health Neuroscience |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10187439 |
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