Reinforcement Learning and Perception in Schizophrenia
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Reinforcement Learning and Perception in Schizophrenia
IRAS ID
186051
Contact name
Emilio Fernandez-Egea
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cambridge & Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT)
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 4 months, 2 days
Research summary
Schizophrenia affects 1% of the population and is a leading cause of disability and economic burden. Schizophrenia symptoms are divided into positive (delusions and hallucinations), negative (poor motivation and emotional life) and cognitive (memory and attentional deficits). About half of patients will develop chronic disability, mostly due to either negative/cognitive symptoms or to persistent positive symptoms.
Our understanding of the cognitive processes that lead to the emergence and persistence of schizophrenic symptoms is still far from complete. A lot of recent advances have been built on the overarching idea that the brain is constantly using everything it already knows to help it draw inferences about the underlying worldly causes of incoming sensory data. These inferences – our brain’s ‘best guesses’ about the actual causal structure of the world – are constitutive of our perceptions and beliefs. Delusions and hallucinations may well be downstream consequences of problems with how the brain decides which information to rely on, and which information to ignore or discount, when it is engaged in the difficult task of making inferences about the most likely causes of uncertain or noisy data.In this project, we will use an established computerised learning task to investigate how people flexibly upregulate or downregulate belief updating, depending on how confident they are in their current belief. We will also investigate how people use information to make sense of noisy images, using an established perceptual task. We want to investigate how disturbances to integrating existing knowledge with new information, in the domains of both belief and perception, may relate to specific symptomatology. Towards that end, we will also include symptom severity scales will be also included in the evaluations, to a maximum of 3 hours of assessments (which could be done in one, two or three days, depending on volunteer preferences).
REC name
East of England - Cambridge South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/EE/0146
Date of REC Opinion
17 Jul 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion