Trial reportPsychological medicine2020
Dissecting the impact of depression on decision-making.
Trial report in Psychological medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Impact of Decision Aids for Shared Decision-Making for Patients with Early Stage Breast Cancer: A Systematic Review.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2026Pooled it
- Mapping the Causal Correlates of Risky and Ambiguous Decision-Making: Evidence from tES Research.Brain topography · 2025Pooled it
- Investigating functional connectivity differences during food vs. monetary reward processing across appetitive phenotypes of major depressive disorder.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Article
- Reliability of computational versus noncomputational metrics of working memory and episodic memory in serious mental illness.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2026Article
- Trait anxiety selectively amplifies reward learning under uncertainty, while N3 sleep attenuates it.iScience · 2026Article
- Examining Pubertal and Cognitive Differences in Adolescent Depressive Symptoms Using Drift Diffusion Modeling.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Longitudinal analysis of decision-making deficits in binge-eating disorders using drift diffusion modeling.Appetite · 2026Article
- Probing biomarkers and clinical utility of reward learning across species using the Probabilistic Reward Task: 20 years of findings.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- HSSM: A Widely Applicable Toolbox for Hierarchical Bayesian Neurocognitive Modeling.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Sex-specific increased reactivity of the PVT and prolonged PVT→CeA circuit engagement following psilocin administration.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Investigating Sensorimotor Decision-Making in Depressed Individuals Using a Bayesian Approach.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- From symptom-based heterogeneity to mechanism-based profiling in youth ADHD: the promise of computational psychiatry.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Article
- JOINT MODELING FOR LEARNING DECISION-MAKING DYNAMICS IN BEHAVIORAL EXPERIMENTS.The annals of applied statistics · 2025Article
- Psychosocial symptom networks and high-risk sexual behaviors among men who have sex with men: a network analysis.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Linking attention bias to youth social anxiety and depression: Insights from computational modeling of the affective Posner task.Journal of affective disorders · 2025Article
- Prefrontal and parieto-occipital neural signatures of evidence accumulation and response to computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in depression.Npj mental health research · 2025Article
- Treatment-resistant recurrent unipolar and bipolar depression: associative learning abnormalities.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Behavioral and neural dysfunctions in reward-related cognitive control among adolescents with major depressive disorder.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Reward-Related Brain Activity Mediates the Relationship Between Decision-Making Deficits and Pediatric Depression Symptom Severity.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCognitive deficits in depressed adults may reflect impaired decision-making. To investigate this possibility, we analyzed data from unmedicated adults with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and healthy controls as they performed a probabilistic reward task. The Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Model (HDDM) was used to quantify decision-making mechanisms recruited by the task, to determine if any such mechanism was disrupted by depression.
methodsData came from two samples (Study 1: 258 MDD, 36 controls; Study 2: 23 MDD, 25 controls). On each trial, participants indicated which of two similar stimuli was presented; correct identifications were rewarded. Quantile-probability plots and the HDDM quantified the impact of MDD on response times (RT), speed of evidence accumulation (drift rate), and the width of decision thresholds, among other parameters.
resultsRTs were more positively skewed in depressed v. healthy adults, and the HDDM revealed that drift rates were reduced-and decision thresholds were wider-in the MDD groups. This pattern suggests that depressed adults accumulated the evidence needed to make decisions more slowly than controls did.
conclusionsDepressed adults responded slower than controls in both studies, and poorer performance led the MDD group to receive fewer rewards than controls in Study 1. These results did not reflect a sensorimotor deficit but were instead due to sluggish evidence accumulation. Thus, slowed decision-making-not slowed perception or response execution-caused the performance deficit in MDD. If these results generalize to other tasks, they may help explain the broad cognitive deficits seen in depression.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.