Frontal responses during learning predict vulnerability to the psychotogenic effects of ketamine: linking cognition,...

Establishing a neurobiological account of delusion formation that links cognitive processes, brain activity, and symptoms is important to furthering our understanding of psychosis.

To explore a theoretical model of delusion formation that implicates prediction error-dependent associative learning processes in a pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging study using the psychotomimetic drug ketamine.

Within-subject, randomized, placebo-controlled study.

Hospital-based clinical research facility, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, England. The work was completed within the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, Cambridge.

Fifteen healthy, right-handed volunteers (8 of whom were male) with a mean +/- SD age of 29 +/- 7 years and a mean +/- SD predicted full-scale IQ of 113 +/- 4 were recruited from within the local community by advertisement.

Subjects were given low-dose ketamine (100 ng/mL of plasma) or placebo while performing a causal associative learning task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. In a separate session outside the scanner, the dose was increased (to 200 ng/mL of plasma) and subjects underwent a structured clinical interview.

Brain activation, blood plasma levels of ketamine, and scores from psychiatric ratings scales (Brief Psychiatric Ratings Scale, Present State Examination, and Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale).

Low-dose ketamine perturbs error-dependent learning activity in the right frontal cortex (P = .03). High-dose ketamine produces perceptual aberrations (P = .01) and delusion-like beliefs (P = .007). Critically, subjects showing the highest degree of frontal activation with placebo show the greatest occurrence of drug-induced perceptual aberrations (P = .03) and ideas or delusions of reference (P = .04).

These findings relate aberrant prediction error-dependent associative learning to referential ideas and delusions via a perturbation of frontal cortical function. They are consistent with a model of delusion formation positing disruptions in error-dependent learning.