ArticlePsychopharmacology2019
Depressive symptoms bias the prediction-error enhancement of memory towards negative events in reinforcement learning.
Article in Psychopharmacology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hippocampal-cingulate dynamics in the human brain link reinforcement-learning and memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Aberrant insula activity to negative and reduced learning from positive feedback underlie maladaptive self-beliefs in depression.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Listen to your inner body: embodied emotions in predictive neuroscience and traditional East Asian medicine.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Reinforcement learning increasingly relates to memory specificity from childhood to adulthood.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Distorted learning from local metacognition supports transdiagnostic underconfidence.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Event Segmentation Promotes the Reorganization of Emotional Memory.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cognitive Graphs: Representational Substrates for Planning.Decision (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Uncertainty of treatment efficacy moderates placebo effects on reinforcement learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Positive affect modulates memory by regulating the influence of reward prediction errors.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Medial prefrontal cortex suppresses reward-seeking behavior with risk of punishment by reducing sensitivity to reward.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Interval Timing as a Computational Pathway From Early Life Adversity to Affective Disorders.Topics in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Affect-congruent attention modulates generalized reward expectations.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Collective events and individual affect shape autobiographical memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Social value orientation modulates behavioral and neural responses to social influence.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Addiction and Anxiety: A Developmental Perspective.Biological psychiatry · 2023Review
- Abnormal evidence accumulation underlies the positive memory deficit in depression.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Longitudinal Associations Between Prosociality and Depressive Symptoms in Chinese Children: The Mediating Role of Peer Preference.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2022Article
- Valence biases in reinforcement learning shift across adolescence and modulate subsequent memory.eLife · 2022Article
- A Predictive Coding Framework for Understanding Major Depression.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Review
- A predictive account of how novelty influences declarative memory.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
rationaleDepression is a disorder characterized by sustained negative affect and blunted positive affect, suggesting potential abnormalities in reward learning and its interaction with episodic memory.
objectivesThis study investigated how reward prediction errors experienced during learning modulate memory for rewarding events in individuals with depressive and non-depressive symptoms.
methodsAcross three experiments, participants learned the average values of two scene categories in two learning contexts. Each learning context had either high or low outcome variance, allowing us to test the effects of small and large prediction errors on learning and memory. Participants were later tested for their memory of trial-unique scenes that appeared alongside outcomes. We compared learning and memory performance of individuals with self-reported depressive symptoms (N = 101) to those without (N = 184).
resultsAlthough there were no overall differences in reward learning between the depressive and non-depressive group, depression severity within the depressive group predicted greater error in estimating the values of the scene categories. Similarly, there were no overall differences in memory performance. However, in depressive participants, negative prediction errors enhanced episodic memory more so than did positive prediction errors, and vice versa for non-depressive participants who showed a larger effect of positive prediction errors on memory. These results reflected differences in memory both within group and across groups.
conclusionsIndividuals with self-reported depressive symptoms showed relatively intact reinforcement learning, but demonstrated a bias for encoding events that accompanied surprising negative outcomes versus surprising positive ones. We discuss a potential neural mechanism supporting these effects, which may underlie or contribute to the excessive negative affect observed in depression.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.