ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2020
Apathy is associated with reduced precision of prior beliefs about action outcomes.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Noradrenergic deficits contribute to apathy in Parkinson's disease through the precision of expected outcomes.PLoS computational biology · 2022Trial
- Latent profiles of apathy in the general population and their associations with psychopathology and functioning.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The phantastic organ: predictive processing in the brain.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Article
- Characterising negative symptoms in schizophrenia: CHANSS study protocol.BJPsych open · 2025Article
- Distinct Computational Mechanisms of Uncertainty Processing Explain Opposing Exploratory Behaviors in Anxiety and Apathy.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Behavioural changes in frontotemporal dementia and their cognitive and neuroanatomical correlates.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- A task-invariant prior explains trial-by-trial active avoidance behaviour across gain and loss tasks.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Decision cost hypersensitivity underlies Huntington's disease apathy.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- An Active-Inference Approach to Second-Person Neuroscience.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- A neuroanatomical and cognitive model of impaired social behaviour in frontotemporal dementia.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Review
- Impaired value-based decision-making in Parkinson's disease apathy.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Article
- Cognitive effort and active inference.Neuropsychologia · 2023Article
- Validation study of the apathy motivation index in French adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Disordered Decision Making: A Cognitive Framework for Apathy and Impulsivity in Huntington's Disease.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2022Review
- I overthink-Therefore I am not: An active inference account of altered sense of self and agency in depersonalisation disorder.Consciousness and cognition · 2022Article
- Toward the unity of pathological and exertional fatigue: A predictive processing model.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
- Evidence and implications of abnormal predictive coding in dementia.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2021Review
- Depression as a Failed Anxiety: The Continuum of Precision-Weighting Dysregulation in Affective Disorders.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Apathy is a debilitating syndrome that is associated with reduced goal-directed behavior. Although apathy is common and detrimental to prognosis in many neuropsychiatric diseases, its underlying mechanisms remain controversial. We propose a new model of apathy, in the context of Bayesian theories of brain function, whereby actions require predictions of their outcomes to be held with sufficient precision for "explaining away" differences in sensory inputs. In the active inference model, apathy results from reduced precision of prior beliefs about action outcomes. We tested this hypothesis using a visuomotor task in healthy adults (N = 47), with experimental manipulation of physical effort and financial reward. Bayesian modeling of performance and participants' perception of their performance was used to infer the precision of their priors. We confirmed that the perception of performance was biased toward the target, which was accounted for by relatively precise prior beliefs about action outcomes. These priors were consistently more precise than the corresponding performance distribution, and were scaled to effort and reward. Crucially, prior precision was negatively associated with trait apathy, suggesting that apathetic individuals had less precise prior beliefs about action outcomes. The results support a Bayesian account of apathy that could inform future studies of clinical populations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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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.