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Relative risk of probabilistic category learning deficits in patients with schizophrenia and their siblings.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Although patients with schizophrenia display an overall probabilistic category learning performance deficit, the extent to which this deficit occurs in unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia is unknown. There are also discrepant findings regarding probabilistic category learning acquisition rate and performance in patients with schizophrenia. METHODS:A probabilistic category learning test was administered to 108 patients with schizophrenia, 82 unaffected siblings, and 121 healthy participants. RESULTS:Patients with schizophrenia displayed significant differences from their unaffected siblings and healthy participants with respect to probabilistic category learning acquisition rates. Although siblings on the whole failed to differ from healthy participants on strategy and quantitative indexes of overall performance and learning acquisition, application of a revised learning criterion enabling classification into good and poor learners on the basis of individual learning curves revealed significant differences between percentages of sibling and healthy poor learners: healthy (13.2%), siblings (34.1%), patients (48.1%), yielding a moderate relative risk. CONCLUSIONS:These results clarify previous discrepant findings pertaining to probabilistic category learning acquisition rate in schizophrenia and provide the first evidence for the relative risk of probabilistic category learning abnormalities in unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia, supporting genetic underpinnings of probabilistic category learning deficits in schizophrenia. These findings also raise questions regarding the contribution of antipsychotic medication to the probabilistic category learning deficit in schizophrenia. The distinction between good and poor learning might be used to inform genetic studies designed to detect schizophrenia risk alleles.

SUBMITTER: Weickert TW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2862879 | biostudies-literature | 2010 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Relative risk of probabilistic category learning deficits in patients with schizophrenia and their siblings.

Weickert Thomas W TW Goldberg Terry E TE Egan Michael F MF Apud Jose A JA Meeter Martijn M Myers Catherine E CE Gluck Mark A MA Weinberger Daniel R DR

Biological psychiatry 20100220 10

<h4>Background</h4>Although patients with schizophrenia display an overall probabilistic category learning performance deficit, the extent to which this deficit occurs in unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia is unknown. There are also discrepant findings regarding probabilistic category learning acquisition rate and performance in patients with schizophrenia.<h4>Methods</h4>A probabilistic category learning test was administered to 108 patients with schizophrenia, 82 unaffected sib ...[more]

PMID: 20172502

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Project description:Deficits in reward learning are core symptoms across many mental disorders. Recent work suggests that such learning impairments arise by a diminished ability to use reward history to guide behaviour, but the neuro-computational mechanisms through which these impairments emerge remain unclear. Moreover, limited work has taken a transdiagnostic approach to investigate whether the psychological and neural mechanisms that give rise to learning deficits are shared across forms of psychopathology. To provide insight into this issue, we explored probabilistic reward learning in patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (n = 33) or schizophrenia (n = 24) and 33 matched healthy controls by combining computational modelling and single-trial EEG regression. In our task, participants had to integrate the reward history of a stimulus to decide whether it is worthwhile to gamble on it. Adaptive learning in this task is achieved through dynamic learning rates that are maximal on the first encounters with a given stimulus and decay with increasing stimulus repetitions. Hence, over the course of learning, choice preferences would ideally stabilize and be less susceptible to misleading information. We show evidence of reduced learning dynamics, whereby both patient groups demonstrated hypersensitive learning (i.e. less decaying learning rates), rendering their choices more susceptible to misleading feedback. Moreover, there was a schizophrenia-specific approach bias and a depression-specific heightened sensitivity to disconfirmational feedback (factual losses and counterfactual wins). The inflexible learning in both patient groups was accompanied by altered neural processing, including no tracking of expected values in either patient group. Taken together, our results thus provide evidence that reduced trial-by-trial learning dynamics reflect a convergent deficit across depression and schizophrenia. Moreover, we identified disorder distinct learning deficits.

Dataset Information

Relative risk of probabilistic category learning deficits in patients with schizophrenia and their siblings.

Publications

Relative risk of probabilistic category learning deficits in patients with schizophrenia and their siblings.

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