ArticlePLoS computational biology2022
The computational relationship between reinforcement learning, social inference, and paranoia.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 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
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Impressions about harm are formed rapidly and then refined, modulated by serotonin.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Trial
- Inferring the causes of noise from binary outcomes: A normative theory of learning under uncertainty.Psychological review · 2026Article
- Transdiagnostic mental health symptom dimensions predict use of flexible model-based inference in complex environments.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Validation of the Eight-Item Paranoid Thoughts Scale (GPTS-8) in Tunisian Arab Adults.International journal of methods in psychiatric research · 2025Article
- Twin differences in the Minnesota Trust Game relate to neural mechanisms of suspiciousness.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- A counterweight model for understanding and treating persecutory delusions.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Harmonizing cross-cultural and transdiagnostic assessment of social cognition by expert panel consensus.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Jumping to attributions during social evaluation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Cross-cultural validation of the revised Green et al., paranoid thoughts scale.Psychological medicine · 2024Article
- Lesions to the mediodorsal thalamus, but not orbitofrontal cortex, enhance volatility beliefs linked to paranoia.Cell reports · 2024Article
- Conspiracy beliefs and perceptual inference in times of political uncertainty.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Value Representations of Spite Sensitivity in Psychosis on the Minnesota Trust Game.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2024Article
- Dopamine and serotonin in human substantia nigra track social context and value signals during economic exchange.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Altered Perception of Environmental Volatility During Social Learning in Emerging Psychosis.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- (Mal)adaptive Mentalizing in the Cognitive Hierarchy, and Its Link to Paranoia.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- D2/D3 dopamine supports the precision of mental state inferences and self-relevance of joint social outcomes.Nature. Mental health · 2024Article
- Relationships between cognitive biases, decision-making, and delusions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Assumed shared belief about conspiracy theories in social networks protects paranoid individuals against distress.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Specificity of Paranoia and Uncertainty.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Theoretical accounts suggest heightened uncertainty about the state of the world underpin aberrant belief updates, which in turn increase the risk of developing a persecutory delusion. However, this raises the question as to how an agent's uncertainty may relate to the precise phenomenology of paranoia, as opposed to other qualitatively different forms of belief. We tested whether the same population (n = 693) responded similarly to non-social and social contingency changes in a probabilistic reversal learning task and a modified repeated reversal Dictator game, and the impact of paranoia on both. We fitted computational models that included closely related parameters that quantified the rigidity across contingency reversals and the uncertainty about the environment/partner. Consistent with prior work we show that paranoia was associated with uncertainty around a partner's behavioural policy and rigidity in harmful intent attributions in the social task. In the non-social task we found that pre-existing paranoia was associated with larger decision temperatures and commitment to suboptimal cards. We show relationships between decision temperature in the non-social task and priors over harmful intent attributions and uncertainty over beliefs about partners in the social task. Our results converge across both classes of model, suggesting paranoia is associated with a general uncertainty over the state of the world (and agents within it) that takes longer to resolve, although we demonstrate that this uncertainty is expressed asymmetrically in social contexts. Our model and data allow the representation of sociocognitive mechanisms that explain persecutory delusions and provide testable, phenomenologically relevant predictions for causal experiments.
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.