Abstract
Evidence shows that there are individual differences in the extent to which people attend to and integrate information into their decisions about the predictive contingencies between events and outcomes. In particular, information about the absence of events or outcomes, presented outside the current task frame, is often neglected. This trend is particularly evident in depression, as well as other psychopathologies, though reasons for information neglect remain unclear. We investigated this phenomenon across two experiments (Experiment 1: N=157; Experiment 2: N=150) in which participants, scoring low and high in the Beck Depression Inventory, were asked to learn a simple predictive relationship between a visual cue and an auditory outcome. We manipulated whether or not participants had prior experience of the visual cue outside of the task frame, whether such experience took place in the same or different context to the learning task, and the nature of the action required to signal occurrence of the auditory outcome. We found that all participants were capable of including extra-task experience into their assessment of the predictive cue-outcome relationship in whatever context it occurred. However, for mildly depressed participants, adjacent behaviours and similarity between the extra-task experience and the main task, influenced information integration, with patterns of ‘over-integration’ evident, rather than neglect as we had expected. Findings are suggestive of over-generalised experience on the part of mildly depressed participants.
Highlights
Experiment 1We tested whether depressed and nondepressed people's learning about the relationship between a predictive stimulus and an outcome is affected by exposure to contextual information and the absence of outcomes which occur outside the current task frame (see Table 1)
Evidence shows that there are individual differences in the extent to which people attend to and integrate information into their decisions about the predictive contingencies between events and outcomes
Information about the absence of events or outcomes, presented outside the current task frame, is often neglected. This trend is evident in depression, as well as other psychopathologies, though reasons for information neglect remain unclear. We investigated this phenomenon across two experiments (Experiment 1: N = 157; Experiment 2: N = 150) in which participants, scoring low and high in the Beck Depression Inventory, were asked to learn a simple predictive relationship between a visual cue and an auditory outcome
Summary
We tested whether depressed and nondepressed people's learning about the relationship between a predictive stimulus and an outcome is affected by exposure to contextual information and the absence of outcomes which occur outside the current task frame (see Table 1). In no pre-exposure conditions (Fig. 2, left), there is a perfect contingency, ΔP = 1, between the predictive stimulus and the occurrence of the outcome. In pre-exposure conditions the perfect ΔP value is degraded by numerous presentations of the predictive stimulus outside of the task frame in Phase 1 The manipulation of context and outcome absence was extra-task frame variables designed to influence learning in Phase 2. This allowed us to test sensitivity to two of the five information types, whilst controlling for the others. If participants are sensitive to the absence of reinforcement information presented in Phase 1, Fig. 2 shows that there should be weaker learning in the pre-exposure group in Phase 2. Depressive differences in sensitivity to the context, either increased or decreased sensitivity, should be evident in the size of preexposure effects in the different contexts
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