Increasing Response Vigour Under Time Pressure as a Transdiagnostic Marker of Eating Disorders

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Eating disorders (EDs) involve intense concerns about food and weight, impacting decision-making and leading to persistent behaviors despite diminishing rewards.
• Altered decision-making, specifically a shift in exploitation-exploration balance, is hypothesized to underlie these persistent behaviors in EDs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether individuals with subclinical ED symptoms exhibit increased behavioral persistence due to altered decision-making processes.
• To examine decision thresholds and the exploitation-exploration balance in individuals with subclinical ED symptoms compared to healthy controls.

Main Methods:

• A foraging task was used to measure behavioral persistence and decision thresholds in a subclinical ED group (sED; N=44) and a healthy control group (HC; N=56).
• Behavioral persistence was quantified by the time spent exploiting options, and decision thresholds by the counterfactual reward at the point of switching options.

Main Results:

• Contrary to predictions, no significant differences in persistence or decision thresholds were found between the sED and HC groups.
• Exploratory analyses revealed that the sED group displayed progressively faster response times as block time limits approached.
• This increase in motor vigour correlated with the severity of eating disorder symptoms across diagnostic categories.

Conclusions:

• The study found no evidence for altered decision-making thresholds or increased persistence in subclinical ED symptoms.
• Increased motor vigour, particularly under time pressure, emerged as a potential transdiagnostic marker for eating disorder tendencies.
• Further research into motor vigour could offer new insights into the neurobiological underpinnings of EDs.