Diminished prospective mental representations of reward mediate reward learning strategies among youth with internalizing symptoms

Abstract

Background Adolescent internalizing symptoms and trauma exposure have been linked with altered reward learning processes and decreased ventral striatal responses to rewarding cues. Recent computational work on decision-making highlights an important role for prospective representations of the imagined outcomes of different choices. This study tested whether internalizing symptoms and trauma exposure among youth impact the generation of prospective reward representations during decision-making and potentially mediate altered behavioral strategies during reward learning. Methods Sixty-one adolescent females with varying exposure to interpersonal violence exposure (n = 31 with histories of physical or sexual assault) and severity of internalizing symptoms completed a social reward learning task during fMRI. Multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA) were used to decode neural reward representations at the time of choice. Results MVPA demonstrated that rewarding outcomes could accurately be decoded within several large-scale distributed networks (e.g. frontoparietal and striatum networks), that these reward representations were reactivated prospectively at the time of choice in proportion to the expected probability of receiving reward, and that youth with behavioral strategies that favored exploiting high reward options demonstrated greater prospective generation of reward representations. Youth internalizing symptoms, but not trauma exposure characteristics, were negatively associated with both the behavioral strategy of exploiting high reward options as well as the prospective generation of reward representations in the striatum. Conclusions These data suggest diminished prospective mental simulation of reward as a mechanism of altered reward learning strategies among youth with internalizing symptoms.

Decoding neural reactivation of threat during fear learning, extinction, and recall in a randomized clinical trial of L-DOPA among women with PTSD

“…Figure 1 provides an overview of the analytical approach, which is in direct accord with our previous MVPA investigations (Cisler, Tamman, & Fonzo, 2023;Moughrabi et al, 2022).…”

“…Only non-reinforced CS+ trials were included in these analyses. Following recent work (Cisler et al, 2023;Moughrabi et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2021), a leave-one-out approach was used, such that a subject was designated as the left-out test subject, the US decoders were trained on all remaining participants' US v. no-US data except for the left-out test subject, and the resulting US decoders were applied to the left-out participant's data for each day 1 CS. This process was repeated for each subject.…”

Climate Trauma from Wildfire Exposure Impacts Cognitive Decision-Making

“…Relevant to the current research, Paulus et al 27 have further shown that response inconsistencies with regard to Win-Stay (or Lose-Shift) behavior in a two-choice prediction task are linked with activation of parietal cortex in a functional neuroimaging study. Given, the lack of neural evidence for the implications of climate trauma, other neurophysiological studies of non-climate trauma may serve as a reference guide for understanding 20,[29][30][31] . Overall, this study hypothesizes that reward-related decision-making dynamics indexed by the Win-Stay measure may differ for individuals who have experienced climate trauma and further associated with neural dynamics in fronto-parietal brain regions.…”