ArticleSchizophrenia research2020
Reinforcement learning as an intermediate phenotype in psychosis? Deficits sensitive to illness stage but not associated with polygenic risk of schizophrenia in the general population.
Article in Schizophrenia research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Value representation in youth psychopathology: evidence of a transdiagnostic risk mechanism for psychosis.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Clinical psychopathology-based early relapse prediction model using speech and language in psychosis.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Review
- Intertemporal Pavlovian biases and links with mental health in the general population.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Temporal stability of semantic predictions in subclinical autistic and schizotypal personality traits.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Pavlovian impatience: The anticipation of immediate rewards increases approach behaviour.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Improving the Reliability of the Pavlovian Go/No-Go Task for Computational Psychiatry Research.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Cognitive subgroups of affective and non-affective psychosis show differences in medication and cortico-subcortical brain networks.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Distinct alterations in probabilistic reversal learning across at-risk mental state, first episode psychosis and persistent schizophrenia.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Associative learning and facial expression recognition in schizophrenic patients: Effects of social presence.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2024Article
- Association between increased anterior cingulate glutamate and psychotic-like experiences, but not autistic traits in healthy volunteers.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neural Circuitry of Salience and Reward Processing in Psychosis.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2023Review
- The impact of social anxiety on feedback-based go and nogo learning.Psychological research · 2022Article
- The prediction-error hypothesis of schizophrenia: new data point to circuit-specific changes in dopamine activity.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- The Role of Dopaminergic Genes in Probabilistic Reinforcement Learning in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Action selection in early stages of psychosis: an active inference approach.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNArticle
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17 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundSchizophrenia is a complex disorder in which the causal relations between risk genes and observed clinical symptoms are not well understood and the explanatory gap is too wide to be clarified without considering an intermediary level. Thus, we aimed to test the hypothesis of a pathway from molecular polygenic influence to clinical presentation occurring via deficits in reinforcement learning.
methodsWe administered a reinforcement learning task (Go/NoGo) that measures reinforcement learning and the effect of Pavlovian bias on decision making. We modelled the behavioural data with a hierarchical Bayesian approach (hBayesDM) to decompose task performance into its underlying learning mechanisms. Study 1 included controls (n = 29, F|M = 0.81), At Risk Mental State for psychosis (ARMS, n = 23, F|M = 0.35) and FEP (First-episode psychosis, n = 26, F|M = 0.18). Study 2 included healthy adolescents (n = 735, F|M = 1.06), 390 of whom had their polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia (PRSs) calculated.
resultsPatients with FEP showed significant impairments in overriding Pavlovian conflict, a lower learning rate and a lower sensitivity to both reward and punishment. Less widespread deficits were observed in ARMS. PRSs did not significantly predict performance on the task in the general population, which only partially correlated with measures of psychopathology.
conclusionsReinforcement learning deficits are observed in first episode psychosis and, to some extent, in those at clinical risk for psychosis, and were not predicted by molecular genetic risk for schizophrenia in healthy individuals. The study does not support the role of reinforcement learning as an intermediate phenotype in psychosis.
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