Aberrant perception of environmental volatility during social learning in emerging psychosis

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 aberrant prediction errors lead to a brittle model of the world providing a breeding ground for delusions. Here, we employ a Bayesian approach to test for a more 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 shifts in perceived 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.

D2/D3 dopamine supports the precision of mental state inferences and self-relevance of joint social outcomes

“…Humans try to reduce this uncertainty by relying on available heuristics, such as using self-preferences as an easily accessible prior belief about others (Anderson & Chen, 2002; Barnby et al, 2022b; Tarantola et al, 2017). When ambiguity increases, greater uncertainty about others (Barnby et al, 2020b; 2022a; Hauke et al, 2023) and environments (Reed et al, 2022) can increase the perception of social threat. Our analysis suggests that haloperidol may attenuate the relationship between uncertainty and attributions of harmful intent by reducing the perceived self-relevance of others’ actions; attributions of harmful intent, by definition, are inferences about the relevance of threat to the self from another.…”

“…Computational modelling bridges gaps between neuroscience and clinical expression (Huys et al, 2016;Montague et al, 2012), offering precise accounts of complex behaviour. Within this framework, dopaminergic alterations have been linked to core computational processes related to psychosis, such as aberrant salience (Howes et al, 2020), slower belief updating (Adams et al, 2013;Ashinoff et al, 2022), increased expectations of volatility (Diaconescu et al, 2020;Hauke et al, 2023;Reed et al, 2020), and model-based control (Mikus et al, 2022a).…”

“…Computational modelling is an approach that allows these dynamic cognitive processes to be modelled and has the potential to connect mechanism more effectively to psychiatric phenomenology (Huys et al, 2016; Montague et al, 2012), offering precise accounts of complex behaviour that are more amenable to formal testing, refutation and refinement. Within this framework, dopaminergic alterations have been linked to computational processes such as slower belief updating (Adams et al, 2013; Ashinoff et al, 2022), increased expectations of belief volatility (Diaconescu et al, 2020; Hauke et al, 2023; Reed et al, 2020), and model-based control (Mikus et al, 2022a).…”

Altered Perception of Environmental Volatility During Social Learning in Emerging Psychosis

“…We thank the participants for volunteering their energy and valuable time despite all the challenges they faced allowing us to pursue this research and the Schizophrenia International Research Society for honoring this work with the best poster price at the 2022 Congress of the Schizophrenia International Research Society. We also acknowledge that previous version of this article was published as part of DJH’s PhD thesis ( Hauke, 2022 ) and made available as a preprint on https://www.medrxiv.org/ ( Hauke et al, 2023 ).…”

Understanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Psychosis Through the Predictive Coding Framework

“…Growing evidence suggests that paranoia and persecutory delusions are associated with one particular high-level prior: that the environment is volatile (frequently changing) ( 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 ). Individuals with elevated paranoia overestimate the volatility of their environments, meaning that they expect the hidden state of the world to change more frequently.…”