Photo: Kirsten Sjøwall
Academic interests:
Psychiatry/clinical psychology:
- psychosis, schizophrenia
- hallucinations, delusions
- inter-individual differences in (long-term) trajectories of psychotic symptoms, associated risk factors & predictors
Cognitive psychology:
- (working) memory
- metacognition
- decision-making under uncertainty
- mental effort
Tags:
psychiatric disorders,
psychology,
Cognitive function
Publications
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Kreis, Isabel; Zhang, Lei; Mittner, Matthias Bodo; Syla, Leonard Parks; Lamm, Claus & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2023).
Aberrant uncertainty processing is linked to psychotic-like experiences, autistic traits, and is reflected in pupil dilation during probabilistic learning
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Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience.
ISSN 1530-7026.
23,
p. 905–919.
doi:
10.3758/s13415-023-01088-2.
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Aberrant belief updating due to misestimation of uncertainty and an increased perception of the world as volatile (i.e., unstable) has been found in autism and psychotic disorders. Pupil dilation tracks events that warrant belief updating, likely reflecting the adjustment of neural gain. However, whether subclinical autistic or psychotic symptoms affect this adjustment and how they relate to learning in volatile environments remains to be unraveled. We investigated the relationship between behavioral and pupillometric markers of subjective volatility (i.e., experience of the world as unstable), autistic traits, and psychotic-like experiences in 52 neurotypical adults with a probabilistic reversal learning task. Computational modeling revealed that participants with higher psychotic-like experience scores overestimated volatility in low-volatile task periods. This was not the case for participants scoring high on autistic-like traits, who instead showed a diminished adaptation of choice-switching behavior in response to risk. Pupillometric data indicated that individuals with higher autistic- or psychotic-like trait and experience scores differentiated less between events that warrant belief updating and those that do not when volatility was high. These findings are in line with misestimation of uncertainty accounts of psychosis and autism spectrum disorders and indicate that aberrancies are already present at the subclinical level.
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Kreis, Isabel Viola; Zhang, Lei; Moritz, Steffen & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2021).
Spared performance but increased uncertainty in schizophrenia: Evidence from a probabilistic decision-making task.
Schizophrenia Research.
ISSN 0920-9964.
doi:
10.1016/j.schres.2021.06.038.
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Aberrant attribution of salience to in fact little informative events might explain the emergence of positive symptoms in schizophrenia and has been linked to belief uncertainty. Uncertainty is thought to be encoded by neuromodulators, including norepinephrine. However, norepinephrinergic encoding of uncertainty, measured as task-related pupil dilation, has rarely been explored in schizophrenia. Here, we addressed this question by comparing individuals with a disorder from the schizophrenia spectrum to a non-psychiatric control group on behavioral and pupillometric measures in a probabilistic prediction task, where different levels of uncertainty were introduced. Behaviorally, patients performed similar to controls, but their belief uncertainty was higher, particularly when instability of the task environment was high, suggesting an increased sensitivity to this instability. Furthermore, while pupil dilation scaled positively with uncertainty, this was less the case for patients, suggesting aberrant neuromodulatory regulation of neural gain, which may hinder the reduction of uncertainty in the long run. Together, the findings point to abnormal uncertainty processing and norepinephrinergic signaling in schizophrenia, potentially informing future development of both psychopharmacological therapies and psychotherapeutic approaches that deal with the processing of uncertain information.
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Kreis, Isabel Viola; Biegler, Robert; Tjelmeland, Håkon; Mittner, Matthias; Reitan, Solveig Merete Klæbo & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2021).
Overestimation of volatility in schizophrenia and autism? A comparative study using a probabilistic reasoning task.
PLOS ONE.
ISSN 1932-6203.
16(1).
doi:
10.1371/journal.pone.0244975.
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Boayue, Nya Mehnwolo; Csifcsak, Gabor; Kreis, Isabel Viola; Schmidt, Carole; Finn, Iselin Caroline & Vollsund, Anna Elfrida Hovde
[Show all 7 contributors for this article]
(2020).
The interplay between executive control, behavioral variability and mind wandering: Insights from a high-definition transcranial direct-current stimulation study.
European Journal of Neuroscience.
ISSN 0953-816X.
doi:
10.1111/ejn.15049.
Full text in Research Archive
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Hegelstad, Wenche; Kreis, Isabel Viola; Tjelmeland, Håkon & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2020).
Psychosis and Psychotic-Like Symptoms Affect Cognitive Abilities but Not Motivation in a Foraging Task.
Frontiers in Psychology.
ISSN 1664-1078.
11.
doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01632.
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Background and Objective: Goal-directed behavior is a central feature of human functioning. It requires goal appraisal and implicit cost-benefit analyses, i.e., how much effort to invest in the pursuit of a certain goal, against its value and a confidence judgment regarding the chance of attainment. Persons with severe mental illness such as psychosis often struggle with reaching goals. Cognitive deficits, positive symptoms restricting balanced judgment, and negative symptoms such as anhedonia and avolition may compromise goal attainment. The objective of this study was to investigate to what degree symptom severity is related to cognitive abilities, metacognition, and effort-based decision-making in a visual search task.
Methods: Two studies were conducted: study 1: N = 52 (healthy controls), and study 2: N = 46 (23 patients with psychosis/23 matched healthy controls). Symptoms were measured by the CAPE-42 (study 1) and the PANSS (study 2). By using a visual search task, we concomitantly measured (a) accuracy in short-term memory, (b) perceived accuracy by participants making a capture area or confidence interval, and (c) effort by measuring how long one searched for the target. Perseverance was assessed in trials in which the target was omitted and search had to be abandoned.
Results: Higher levels of positive symptoms, and having a diagnosis of psychosis, were associated with larger errors in memory. Participants adjusted both their capture area and their search investment to the error of their memory. Perseverance was associated with negative symptoms in study 1 but not in study 2.
Conclusion: By simultaneously assessing error and confidence in one’s memory, as well as effort in search, we found that memory was affected by positive, not negative, symptoms in healthy controls, and was reduced in patients with psychosis. However, impaired memory did not concur with overconfidence or less effort in search, i.e., goal directed behavior was unrelated to symptoms or diagnosis. Metacognition and motivation were neither affected by cognitive abilities nor by negative symptoms. Clinically, this could indicate that struggles with goal directed behavior in psychosis may not solely be dependent on primary illness factors.
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Kreis, Isabel Viola; Moritz, Steffen & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2020).
Objective Versus Subjective Effort in Schizophrenia.
Frontiers in Psychology.
ISSN 1664-1078.
11.
doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01469.
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Background and Objectives: Performance on cognitive tasks is often impaired in individuals with schizophrenia (SCZ), possibly resulting from either cognitive deficits (e.g., limited working memory capacity) or diminished mental effort or both. Investment of mental effort itself can be affected by cognitive resources, task load, and motivational factors and has thus proven difficult to measure. Pupil dilation during task performance has been proposed as an objective measure, but it remains unclear to what extent this converges with self-reports of perceived task demands, motivation, and invested effort. The current study tried to elucidate this question.
Methods: A visual version of the digit span task was administered in a sample of 29 individuals with a diagnosis from the SCZ spectrum and 30 individuals without any psychiatric disorder. Pupil size was recorded during the task, whereas self-reported invested effort and task demand were measured afterward.
Results: No group difference was found for working memory capacity, but individuals with SCZ showed diminished trial-by-trial recall accuracy, showed reduced pupil dilation across all task load conditions, and reported higher perceived task demands.
Conclusion: Results indicate reduced effort investment in patients with SCZ, but it remains unclear to what extent this alone could explain the lower recall performance. The lack of a direct link between objective and subjective measures of effort further suggests that both may assess different facets of effort. This has important implications for clinical and research settings that rely on the reliability of neuropsychological test results when assessing cognitive capacity in this patient group.
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Kreis, Isabel Viola; Mittner, Matthias; Lei, Zhang & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2019).
Prediction error processing & psychotic-like experiences in healthy individuals.
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Kreis, Isabel Viola; Moritz, Steffen & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2019).
The effects of effort on working memory performance and pupillary responses in schizophrenia.
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Kreis, Isabel Viola; Tjelmeland, Håkon; Biegler, Robert; Tröbinger, Luzia Rosa & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2017).
Ignorance or awareness of changes measured in a probabilistic inference task.
Full text in Research Archive
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Kreis, Isabel Viola; Sandvik, Kristin; Tjelmeland, Håkon; Biegler, Robert & Pfuhl, Gerit
(2017).
Probabilistic inference in psychosis and autism.
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Published
Jan. 31, 2022 3:56 PM
- Last modified
Mar. 17, 2023 9:45 AM