The value of novelty in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia Research
Cristina MartinelliSukhwinder S Shergill

Abstract

Influential models of schizophrenia suggest that patients experience incoming stimuli as excessively novel and motivating, with important consequences for hallucinatory experience and delusional belief. However, whether schizophrenia patients exhibit excessive novelty value and whether this interferes with adaptive behaviour has not yet been formally tested. Here, we employed a three-armed bandit task to investigate this hypothesis. Schizophrenia patients and healthy controls were first familiarised with a group of images and then asked to repeatedly choose between familiar and unfamiliar images associated with different monetary reward probabilities. By fitting a reinforcement-learning model we were able to estimate the values attributed to familiar and unfamiliar images when first presented in the context of the decision-making task. In line with our hypothesis, we found increased preference for newly introduced images (irrespective of whether these were familiar or unfamiliar) in patients compared to healthy controls and this to correlate with severity of hallucinatory experience. In addition, we found a correlation between value assigned to novel images and task performance, suggesting that excessive novelty value may inter...Continue Reading

Citations

Feb 5, 2021·NPJ Schizophrenia·Flurin CathomasStefan Kaiser
Oct 15, 2020·Neurobiology of Learning and Memory·Andrew R Tapper, Susanna Molas

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