Reduced learning bias towards the reward context in medication-naive first-episode schizophrenia patients

BACKGROUND: Reinforcement learning has been proposed to contribute to the development of amotivation in individuals with schizophrenia (SZ). Accumulating evidence suggests dysfunctional learning in individuals with SZ in Go/NoGo learning and expected value representation. However, previous findings might have been confounded by the effects of antipsychotic exposure. Moreover, reinforcement learning also rely on the learning context. Few studies have examined the learning performance in reward and loss-avoidance context separately in medication-naïve individuals with first-episode SZ. This study aimed to explore the behaviour profile of reinforcement learning performance in medication-naïve individuals with first-episode SZ, including the contextual performance, the Go/NoGo learning and the expected value representation performance. METHODS: Twenty-nine medication-naïve individuals with first-episode SZ and 40 healthy controls (HCs) who have no significant difference in age and gender, completed the Gain and Loss Avoidance Task, a reinforcement learning task involving stimulus pairs presented in both the reward and loss-avoidance context. We assessed the group difference in accuracy in the reward and loss-avoidance context, the Go/NoGo learning and the expected value representation. The correlations between learning performance and the negative symptom severity were examined. RESULTS: Individuals with SZ showed significantly lower accuracy when learning under the reward than the loss-avoidance context as compared to HCs. The accuracies under the reward context (90%win- 10%win) in the Acquisition phase was significantly and negatively correlated with the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) avolition scores in individuals with SZ. On the other hand, individuals with SZ showed spared ability of Go/NoGo learning and expected value representation. CONCLUSIONS: Despite our small sample size and relatively modest findings, our results suggest possible reduced learning bias towards reward context among medication-naïve individuals with first-episode SZ. The reward learning performance was correlated with amotivation symptoms. This finding may facilitate our understanding of the underlying mechanism of negative symptoms. Reinforcement learning performance under the reward context may be important to better predict and prevent the development of schizophrenia patients’ negative symptom, especially amotivation. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12888-021-03682-5.