Journal
TRANSLATIONAL PSYCHIATRY
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41398-018-0103-0
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Funding
- Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council (ARC) [FL0992409]
- National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
- National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) [1069487]
- ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (Macquarie University)
- NHMRC R.D. Wright Biomedical Career Development Fellowship [APP1061875]
- ARC Future Fellowship [FT100100260]
- NHMRC [GNT1079561]
- Pratt Foundation
- Ramsay Health Care
- Viertel Charitable Foundation
- Schizophrenia Research Institute
- NHMRC
- National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia [1069487] Funding Source: NHMRC
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Learning the causal relation between actions and their outcomes (AO learning) is critical for goal-directed behavior when actions are guided by desire for the outcome. This can be contrasted with habits that are acquired by reinforcement and primed by prevailing stimuli, in which causal learning plays no part. Recently, we demonstrated that goal-directed actions are impaired in schizophrenia; however, whether this deficit exists alongside impairments in habit or reinforcement learning is unknown. The present study distinguished deficits in causal learning from reinforcement learning in schizophrenia. We tested people with schizophrenia (SZ, n = 25) and healthy adults (HA, n = 25) in a vending machine task. Participants learned two action-outcome contingencies (e.g., push left to get a chocolate M&M, push right to get a cracker), and they also learned one contingency was degraded by delivery of noncontingent outcomes (e.g., free M&Ms), as well as changes in value by outcome devaluation. Both groups learned the best action to obtain rewards; however, SZ did not distinguish the more causal action when one AO contingency was degraded. Moreover, action selection in SZ was insensitive to changes in outcome value unless feedback was provided, and this was related to the deficit in AO learning. The failure to encode the causal relation between action and outcome in schizophrenia occurred without any apparent deficit in reinforcement learning. This implies that poor goal-directed behavior in schizophrenia cannot be explained by a more primary deficit in reward learning such as insensitivity to reward value or reward prediction errors.
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