Delusional thinking and action binding in healthy individuals

Liyu Cao,Michael B Steinborn,Barbara F Haendel

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-97977-y

Liyu Cao, Michael B Steinborn + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97977-y

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Sep 23, 2021
Citations: 5	License type: open-access

Affiliation: University of Würzburg, Zhejiang University

Abstract

Action binding is the effect that the perceived time of an action is shifted towards the action related feedback. A much larger action binding effect in schizophrenia compared to normal controls has been shown, which might be due to positive symptoms like delusions. Here we investigated the relationship between delusional thinking and action binding in healthy individuals, predicting a positive correlation between them. The action binding effect was evaluated by comparing the perceived time of a keypress between an operant (keypress triggering a sound) and a baseline condition (keypress alone), with a novel testing method that massively improved the precision of the subjective timing measurement. A positive correlation was found between the tendency of delusional thinking (measured by the 21-item Peters et al. delusions inventory) and action binding across participants after controlling for the effect of testing order between operant and baseline conditions. The results indicate that delusional thinking in particular influences action time perception and support the notion of a continuous distribution of schizotypal traits with normal controls at one end and clinical patients at the other end.

Highlights

Action binding is the effect that the perceived time of an action is shifted towards the action related feedback
If delusions are a key factor contributing to the strong action binding in schizophrenia, we might find a similar trend in the healthy population, i.e. individuals with a high tendency of delusional thinking may exhibit a strong action binding effect
Through progressively leaving out trials from the beginning of each testing condition before the action binding effect was calculated and compared between the two testing order groups, the results showed that the testing order effect started to, and consistently thereafter, fall above the statistical significance threshold (p = 0.05) when the first 8 trials from each condition were omitted in the action binding calculation (Fig. 2b)

Summary

Introduction

Action binding is the effect that the perceived time of an action is shifted towards the action related feedback. A positive correlation was found between the tendency of delusional thinking (measured by the 21-item Peters et al delusions inventory) and action binding across participants after controlling for the effect of testing order between operant and baseline conditions. The perception of action time is heavily influenced by action related sensory feedback Action binding demonstrates such an influence by showing that the perceived time of a keypress is shifted towards the time of a delayed sound triggered by the keypress[1]. It has been shown that especially those suffering from positive symptoms including delusions have impairments in predicting the sensory feedback from own actions[9,10,11,12] In healthy individuals, those having a high tendency of delusional thinking show a similar deficit in predicting sensory feedback[13,14,15,16]. To the best of our knowledge, the issue of testing order in action binding has not been formally investigated

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