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Cognitive effort avoidance and detection in people with schizophrenia
James M Gold1, Wouter Kool, Matthew M Botvinick
1Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, PO Box 21247, Baltimore, MD, 21228, USA, jgold@mprc.umaryland.edu.
Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience
|June 25, 2014
Summary
People with schizophrenia do not avoid cognitive effort more than healthy individuals. Instead, intellectual ability and effort detection explain differences in cognitive effort avoidance.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Avolition, a negative symptom of schizophrenia, involves difficulty with goal-directed behavior.
- Individuals with schizophrenia may have an exaggerated perception of effort costs for rewards.
- Research is needed to understand cognitive effort avoidance in schizophrenia.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate cognitive effort avoidance in schizophrenia using the demand selection task.
- To compare cognitive effort avoidance between individuals with schizophrenia and healthy controls.
- To explore factors influencing cognitive effort avoidance, including effort detection and intellectual ability.
Main Methods:
- 83 individuals with schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder and 71 healthy volunteers completed three experiments using a demand selection task.
- Instructions were varied across experiments to assess cognitive demand avoidance.
- A control experiment evaluated effort demand detection, and correlations with IQ, neuropsychological ability, and symptom severity were examined.
Main Results:
- Neither group showed significant cognitive demand avoidance in the standard task.
- Healthy controls exhibited greater demand avoidance than patients under enhanced instructions.
- Patients showed reduced ability to detect effort demands, which correlated with effort avoidance in both groups.
Conclusions:
- Schizophrenia is not characterized by exaggerated cognitive effort avoidance.
- Individual differences in intellectual ability and effort detection influence cognitive effort avoidance.
- Subtle reductions in effort avoidance in schizophrenia may be explained by these individual differences.
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