Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Forensic Psychiatric Centre Pompestichting, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Cortex. 2022 Apr;149:44-58. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.01.006. Epub 2022 Jan 31.
Psychopathic individuals typically present with associative learning impairments under explicit learning conditions. The present study aimed to investigate whether the formation of stimulus-outcome associations, as well as updating of these associations after changed contingencies, could be improved by using rewards with sufficiently high subjective values. To this end, 20 psychopathic offenders, 17 non-psychopathic offenders and 18 healthy controls performed a passive avoidance task with a reversal phase under three motivational conditions, using naturalistic rewards. The subjective values of the rewards were assessed a priori for each individual participant using a visual analogue scale. The correspondence of these values to their internal representation was confirmed by analyses of brain potentials. Analyses using both signal detection theory and classical approaches indicated that psychopathic offenders performed worse compared to the other groups during passive avoidance learning. However, using the signal detection approach, we found this deficiency to be present only when a hypothetical reward was used ('neutral reward' condition), whereas psychopathic offenders performed similar to the other groups when naturalistic rewards could be obtained ('low reward' and 'high reward' conditions). Furthermore, traditional analyses suggested that psychopathic offenders had more hits than the other groups during reversal learning, but the signal detection approach indicated that no effects of group or condition were present. Analysis of win-stay and lose-shift behaviour showed that psychopathic offenders were less likely to stay with a rewarded response during passive avoidance learning in the neutral reward condition. In addition, regardless of experimental phase or condition, psychopathic offenders were less likely to stop responding to a particular stimulus after receiving negative feedback. Although the approaches employed did not lead to unequivocal results, our findings suggest that psychopathic offenders do have the ability to adapt their behaviour to environmental contingencies when positive reinforcers with sufficiently high subjective values are used.
精神病态个体通常在明确学习条件下表现出联想学习障碍。本研究旨在探讨使用具有足够高主观价值的奖励是否可以改善刺激-结果关联的形成以及在变化的关联后更新这些关联。为此，20 名精神病态罪犯、17 名非精神病态罪犯和 18 名健康对照者在三种动机条件下使用自然奖励进行了被动回避任务，其中包括反转阶段。使用视觉模拟量表对每个个体参与者的奖励的主观价值进行了预先评估。通过分析脑电位来确认这些价值与其内部表示的对应关系。使用信号检测理论和经典方法的分析表明，精神病态罪犯在被动回避学习中表现不如其他组。然而，使用信号检测方法，我们发现这种缺陷仅在使用假设奖励时存在（“中性奖励”条件），而当可以获得自然奖励时，精神病态罪犯的表现与其他组相似（“低奖励”和“高奖励”条件）。此外，传统分析表明，精神病态罪犯在反转学习中比其他组有更多的命中，但信号检测方法表明没有组或条件的影响。获胜保持和输转变的行为分析表明，在中性奖励条件下，精神病态罪犯在被动回避学习中更不可能保持对奖励反应的选择。此外，无论实验阶段或条件如何，精神病态罪犯在收到负面反馈后更不可能停止对特定刺激的反应。尽管采用的方法没有得出明确的结果，但我们的发现表明，当使用具有足够高主观价值的正强化物时，精神病态罪犯确实有能力根据环境的变化来调整他们的行为。
