Abstract
 

Mechanisms of Motivational Deficits Along the Psychosis Spectrum

Motivational deficits are a debilitating aspect of schizophrenia, comprising a chief component of the negative symptoms of the disorder. Despite their tremendous financial and social costs, the origins of motivational deficits in psychotic illness remain unclear. Work in my lab has sought to uncover mechanisms of motivational deficits by parsing reward-based (reinforcement) learning and cost/benefit decision-making at the computational, psychological, and neural levels of analysis. First, I will summarize our approach to studying motivational deficits in psychotic illness from these three perspectives. Next, I will discuss our findings from a range of cognitive neuroscience studies of motivation in psychotic illness. Designed to shed light on neural and behavioral mechanisms that may relate to the origins of motivational deficits, these studies focus on component processes in the abilities to learn about value, such as sensitivity to experienced rewards, the prospective representation of value, and the consideration of the costs of actions, in terms of effort. I will also touch on factors that affect adaptive decision-making in people with psychosis, such as disruptions in the ability to decide between exploiting well-known contingencies vs. exploring unknown ones. Finally, I will discuss ongoing work and future directions, regarding investigations into whether computational models of reinforcement learning and decision-making might help to generate useful predictors of clinical and functional outcome in clinical trials and studies of at-risk youth.