Decision-making in social contexts in youth with ADHD

Cognitive-attentional mechanisms of cooperation-with implications for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and cognitive neuroscience

People's cooperativeness depends on many factors, such as their motives, cognition, experiences, and the situation they are in. To date, it is unclear how these factors interact and shape the decision to cooperate. We present a computational account of cooperation that not only provides insights for the design of effective incentive structures but also redefines neglected social-cognitive characteristics associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Leveraging game theory, we demonstrate that the source and magnitude of conflict between different motives affected the speed and frequency of cooperation. Integrating eye-tracking to measure motivation-based information processing during decision-making shows that participants' visual fixations on the gains of cooperation rather than its costs and risks predicted their cooperativeness on a trial-by-trial basis. Using Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we find that a situation's prosociality and participants' past experience each bias the decision-making process distinctively. ADHD characteristics explain individual differences in responsiveness across contexts, highlighting the clinical importance of experimentally studying reactivity in social interactions. We demonstrate how the use of eye-tracking and computational modeling can be used to experimentally investigate social-cognitive characteristics in clinical populations. We also discuss possible underlying neural mechanisms to be investigated in future studies.

Alcohol Use Disorder Displays Trait-Related Reductions in Prosocial Decision Making

BACKGROUND

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with deficits in social cognition, but the relationship between harmful alcohol use and the processes underlying interactive social behavior is still unknown. We hypothesized that prosocial decision making is reduced in AUD and that individual differences in the underlying processes are key to better understanding these reductions.

METHODS

In one laboratory study (Swedish participants, n = 240) and one confirmatory online study (American participants, n = 260), we compared young adults with AUD with age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy control subjects on 6 facets of prosocial decision making. We used standardized behavioral economic tasks, namely the dictator game, ultimatum game, trust game, and third-party game. To better understand the expected differences in prosociality, we evaluated attention by tracking eye gaze, decision response time, clinical symptoms, and social cognition.

RESULTS

Altruism (lab study: p = .007; online study: p < .001), fairness (lab study: p = .003; online study: p = .007), and reciprocal trust (lab study: p = .007; online study: p = .039) were reduced in individuals with AUD compared with healthy control subjects, whereas trust and third-party punishment and compensation were comparable in both studies. Reduced prosociality was associated with attending to the selfish response option, faster response time, and moral attitudes, while being dissociated from both psychiatric symptoms and drinking history in AUD.

CONCLUSIONS

Individuals with AUD have trait-related reductions in prosocial decision making that do not vary with drinking history or psychiatric symptom load. These reductions were confined to one-to-one interactions accompanied by differences in attention, decision time, and moral attitudes.

Uncertainty about others' trustworthiness increases during adolescence and guides social information sampling

Adolescence is a key life phase for developing well-adjusted social behaviour. An essential component of well-adjusted social behaviour is the ability to update our beliefs about the trustworthiness of others based on gathered information. Here, we examined how adolescents (n = 157, 10-24 years) sequentially sampled information about the trustworthiness of peers and how they used this information to update their beliefs about others' trustworthiness. Our Bayesian computational modelling approach revealed an adolescence-emergent increase in uncertainty of prior beliefs about others' trustworthiness. As a consequence, early to mid-adolescents (ages 10-16) gradually relied less on their prior beliefs and more on the gathered evidence when deciding to sample more information, and when deciding to trust. We propose that these age-related differences could be adaptive to the rapidly changing social environment of early and mid-adolescents. Together, these findings contribute to the understanding of adolescent social development by revealing adolescent-emergent flexibility in prior beliefs about others that drives adolescents' information sampling and trust decisions.

Understanding the Dynamics of the Developing Adolescent Brain Through Team Science

One of the major goals for research on adolescent development is to identify the optimal conditions for adolescents to grow up in a complex social world and to understand individual differences in these trajectories. Based on influential theoretical and empirical work in this field, achieving this goal requires a detailed understanding of the social context in which neural and behavioral development takes place, along with longitudinal measurements at multiple levels (e.g., genetic, hormonal, neural, behavioral). In this perspectives article, we highlight the promising role of team science in achieving this goal. To illustrate our point, we describe meso (peer relations) and micro (social learning) approaches to understand social development in adolescence as crucial aspects of adolescent mental health. Finally, we provide an overview of how our team has extended our collaborations beyond scientific partners to multiple societal partners for the purpose of informing and including policymakers, education and health professionals, as well as adolescents themselves when conducting and communicating research.

The social cost of gathering information for trust decisions

Trust decisions are inherently uncertain, as people usually have incomplete information about the trustworthiness of the other person prior to their decision to trust or not trust. Therefore, it is typically beneficial to gather information about a trustee's past behaviour before deciding whether or not to trust them. However, elaborate inquiries about a trustee's behaviour may change the trustee's willingness to reciprocate, causing either a decrease due to the trustee's negative impressions of the investor or an increase because the investor appears to be highly betrayal-averse to the trustee. In turn, such a change could cause the investor to gather less or more information, respectively. Here, we examine how information acquisition is modulated by social context, monetary cost, and the trustee's trustworthiness. We gave participants the opportunity to sequentially sample information about a trustee's reciprocation history before they decided whether or not to invest. Participants sampled less when there was a monetary cost and when the gathered information was more conclusive. On some trials, we induced a social context by telling the participant that the trustee would learn how much the participant sampled ("overt sampling"). Crucially, when sampling was free, participants sampled less when sampling was overt than when it was covert, suggesting that they avoided leaving negative impressions. We find that the data were well accounted for by a Bayesian heuristic model, in which the agent continues sampling until uncertainty about trustworthiness-as measured by the width of the posterior belief-drops below a level that they find tolerable. This study opens the door to broader applications of the tools and models of information sampling to social decision-making.

A review of neuroeconomic gameplay in psychiatric disorders

Abnormalities in social interaction are a common feature of several psychiatric disorders, aligning with the recent move towards using Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) to describe disorders in terms of observable behaviours rather than using specific diagnoses. Neuroeconomic games are an effective measure of social decision-making that can be adapted for use in neuroimaging, allowing investigation of the biological basis for behaviour. This review summarises findings of neuroeconomic gameplay studies in Axis 1 psychiatric disorders and advocates the use of these games as measures of the RDoC Affiliation and Attachment, Reward Responsiveness, Reward Learning and Reward Valuation constructs. Although research on neuroeconomic gameplay is in its infancy, consistencies have been observed across disorders, particularly in terms of impaired integration of social and cognitive information, avoidance of negative social interactions and reduced reward sensitivity, as well as a reduction in activity in brain regions associated with processing and responding to social information.

Do patients with different psychiatric disorders show altered social decision-making? A systematic review of ultimatum game experiments in clinical populations

BACKGROUND

Impairments in social functioning are a common feature of psychiatric disorders. Game paradigms pose a unique way for studying how people make decisions in interpersonal contexts. In the last decade, researchers have started to use these paradigms to study social decision-making in patients with psychiatric disorders.

PURPOSE

The aim of this systematic literature review is to summarise the currently available evidence on the behaviour of patients with psychiatric disorders in the commonly used Ultimatum Game (UG).

METHOD

A systematic literature search including MEDLINE, PsycINFO, PSYNDEXplus Tests, PSYNDEXPLUS Literature, EBM Reviews-Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Embase and PASCAL was performed via the Ovid interface.

RESULTS

We found evidence for alterations in UG behaviour for patients with frontotemporal dementia, schizophrenia, affective disorders, alcohol, cocaine, heroin and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine consumption, alcohol dependence, anxiety disorders, borderline personality disorder, autism, Tourette syndrome and oppositional defiant disorder.

CONCLUSION

There is some evidence that different psychiatric disorders might go along with alterations in social decision-making. However, in general, data are currently limited and studies are hard to compare due to differences in methodologies.