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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

An adaptive role for anhedonia following early-life unpredictability

Yifan Zhang¹, Aaron M Bornstein¹; ¹University of California, Irvine

Presenter: Yifan Zhang

Early-life unpredictability (ELU), a form of early-life adversity, is often followed by anhedonia in adulthood. Formal models show that efficient coding of ELU leads to asymmetrically greater sensitivity to negative, rather than positive, outcomes during learning, while models of consummatory anhedonia suggest that the experience of reduced pleasure can arise from ``warping'' internal representations of environmental states, so that goals seem more distant.Although ELU and anhedonia are highly correlated in the population, how these mechanisms interact remains unclear. Here, we use simulations to examine whether adopting an anhedonic belief about the state space adaptively reduces the hedonic asymmetry that results from ELU. Combining these two computational frameworks, we show that warping both substantially reduces perceived hedonic experience but, critically, with the benefit of reshaping the valence between gains and losses. While belief-space warping attenuates both positive and negative prediction errors, it disproportionately suppresses negative outcomes and alters the tradeoff structure. Further, we found that distinct forms of belief-space warping can confer different adaptive advantages across environments. Taken together, these results suggest that anhedonic belief representations may alleviate the subjective impact of negative outcomes under ELU while also critically shaping behavior in threat-rich settings, offering a computational account of why anhedonia may be prevalent after unpredictable early-life experience.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations