ArticleNPJ schizophrenia2021
Increased random exploration in schizophrenia is associated with inflammation.
Article in NPJ schizophrenia, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Acetylcholine and noradrenaline enhance foraging optimality in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- Basal ganglia deep brain stimulation restores cognitive flexibility and exploration-exploitation balance disrupted by NMDA-R antagonism.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Beyond reward learning deficits: Exploration-exploitation instability reveals computational heterogeneity in value-based decision making in early psychosis.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Modeling Decision-Making in Schizophrenia: Associations Between Computationally Derived Risk Propensity and Self-Reported Risk Perception.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2024Article
- A causal role of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in random exploration.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Elevated serum IL-17 A and CCL20 levels as potential biomarkers in major psychotic disorders: a case-control study.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Decision-making under risk and its correlates in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2024Article
- Temporal changes in brain morphology related to inflammation and schizophrenia: an omnigenic Mendelian randomization study.Psychological medicine · 2024Article
- How does apathy impact exploration-exploitation decision-making in older patients with neurocognitive disorders?npj aging · 2023Article
- Theory-Driven Analysis of Natural Language Processing Measures of Thought Disorder Using Generative Language Modeling.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2023Article
- A review of risky decision-making in psychosis-spectrum disorders.Clinical psychology review · 2022Review
- Piloting the Update: The Use of Therapeutic Relationship for Change - A Free Energy Account.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Peripheral immune cell reactivity and neural response to reward in patients with depression and anhedonia.Translational psychiatry · 2021Article
- Common and disorder-specific upregulation of the inflammatory markers TRAIL and CCL20 in depression and schizophrenia.Scientific reports · 2021Observational
- Review
- Quinolinic acid is associated with cognitive deficits in schizophrenia but not major depressive disorder.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Balancing exploration and exploitation with information and randomization.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2021Article
- Associations Between Negative Symptoms and Effort Discounting in Patients With Schizophrenia and Major Depressive Disorder.Schizophrenia bulletin open · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
One aspect of goal-directed behavior, which is known to be impaired in patients with schizophrenia (SZ), is balancing between exploiting a familiar choice with known reward value and exploring a lesser known, but potentially more rewarding option. Despite its relevance to several symptom domains of SZ, this has received little attention in SZ research. In addition, while there is increasing evidence that SZ is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation, few studies have investigated how this relates to specific behaviors, such as balancing exploration and exploitation. We therefore assessed behaviors underlying the exploration-exploitation trade-off using a three-armed bandit task in 45 patients with SZ and 19 healthy controls (HC). This task allowed us to dissociate goal-unrelated (random) from goal-related (directed) exploration and correlate them with psychopathological symptoms. Moreover, we assessed a broad range of inflammatory proteins in the blood and related them to bandit task behavior. We found that, compared to HC, patients with SZ showed reduced task performance. This impairment was due to a shift from exploitation to random exploration, which was associated with symptoms of disorganization. Relative to HC, patients with SZ showed a pro-inflammatory blood profile. Furthermore, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) positively correlated with random exploration, but not with directed exploration or exploitation. In conclusion, we show that low-grade inflammation in patients with SZ is associated with random exploration, which can be considered a behavioral marker for disorganization. hsCRP may constitute a marker for severity of, and a potential treatment target for maladaptive exploratory behaviors.
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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.