Impaired Evidence Accumulation as a Transdiagnostic Vulnerability Factor in Psychopathology

There is substantial interest in identifying biobehavioral dimensions of individual variation that cut across heterogenous disorder categories, and computational models can play a major role in advancing this goal. In this report, we focused on efficiency of evidence accumulation (EEA), a computationally characterized variable derived from sequential sampling models of choice tasks. We created an EEA factor from three behavioral tasks in the UCLA Phenomics dataset (n = 272), which includes healthy participants (n = 130) as well-participants with schizophrenia (n = 50), bipolar disorder (n = 49), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (n = 43). We found that the EEA factor was significantly reduced in all three disorders, and that it correlated with an overall severity score for psychopathology as well as self-report measures of impulsivity. Although EEA was significantly correlated with general intelligence, it remained associated with psychopathology and symptom scales even after controlling for intelligence scores. Taken together, these findings suggest EEA is a promising computationally-characterized dimension of neurocognitive variation, with diminished EEA conferring transdiagnostic vulnerability to psychopathology.