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A large literature has demonstrated an abnormal sense of agency (SOA) in schizophrenic individuals. One limitation of such studies is that they focus exclusively on cognitive or perceptual judgments, thus failing to address affective aspects of SOA. In our recent work, we have used instrumental divergence – the distance between outcome probability distributions associated with available actions – as a formal measure of agency, demonstrating an influence of this novel decision variable on behavioral choice preferences and associated neural computations in neurotypical adults. Here, we show that the preference for high instrumental divergence (i.e., for high-agency environments) is significantly modulated by individual differences in positive and negative schizotypy dimensions. Implications for future assessments of clinical populations are discussed.
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Neural Substrates Mediating the Utility of Instrumental Divergence
We assessed the neural substrates mediating a recently demonstrated preference for environments with high levels of instrumental divergence – a formal index of flexible operant control. Across choice scenarios, participants chose between gambling environments that differed in terms of both instrumental divergence and expected monetary pay-offs. Using model-based fMRI, we found that activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex scaled with a divergence-based measure of expected utility that reflected the value of both divergence and monetary reward. Implications for a neural common currency for information theoretic and economic variables are discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1654187
- PAR ID:
- 10132584
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2475-2480
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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