Doubting what you already know: Uncertainty regarding state transitions is associated with obsessive compulsive symptoms

摘要

Obsessive compulsive (OC) symptoms involve excessive information gathering (e.g., checking, reassurance seeking), and excessive uncertainty about possible future events. Normally, people can use prior experience to predict present and future events. Here we suggest that OC symptoms can be traced back to an impairment in this prediction mechanism. In Bayesian models of learning and decision making the relative weight given to prior experience depends on the estimation of uncertainty. Particularly, when one believes that past states cannot predict the future with certainty, the optimal behavior is to assign a higher weight to current feedback at the expense of prior experience. We examined this mechanism, using a task that required participants to learn cue-outcome contingencies from feedback, while considering the possibility that occasional changes in the contingencies render past experience irrelevant. A computational analysis of participants' behavior showed that participants with higher OC symptoms indeed assigned lower weight to prior experience, leading to over-exploratory behavior. These results have implications for the understanding of the neurocognitive processes leading to excessive uncertainty and distrust of past experiences in obsessive compulsive disorder.