Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, United States.
Yale MD-PhD Program, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, United States.
Elife. 2020 May 26;9:e56345. doi: 10.7554/eLife.56345.
Paranoia is the belief that harm is intended by others. It may arise from selective pressures to infer and avoid social threats, particularly in ambiguous or changing circumstances. We propose that uncertainty may be sufficient to elicit learning differences in paranoid individuals, without social threat. We used reversal learning behavior and computational modeling to estimate belief updating across individuals with and without mental illness, online participants, and rats chronically exposed to methamphetamine, an elicitor of paranoia in humans. Paranoia is associated with a stronger prior on volatility, accompanied by elevated sensitivity to perceived changes in the task environment. Methamphetamine exposure in rats recapitulates this impaired uncertainty-driven belief updating and rigid anticipation of a volatile environment. Our work provides evidence of fundamental, domain-general learning differences in paranoid individuals. This paradigm enables further assessment of the interplay between uncertainty and belief-updating across individuals and species.
偏执是一种认为他人怀有恶意的信念。它可能源于推断和避免社会威胁的选择性压力，特别是在模棱两可或变化的环境中。我们提出，不确定性足以引起偏执个体的学习差异，而无需社会威胁。我们使用反转学习行为和计算模型来估计在线参与者和慢性暴露于安非他命的大鼠（人类偏执的诱发物）中有无精神疾病的个体的信念更新。偏执与更强的波动性先验相关，伴随着对任务环境感知变化的敏感性增加。大鼠暴露于安非他命重现了这种受损的不确定性驱动的信念更新和对不稳定环境的刻板预期。我们的工作为偏执个体存在基本的、通用的学习差异提供了证据。这种范式使我们能够进一步评估个体和物种之间不确定性和信念更新之间的相互作用。
