Preserved implicit metamemory and investment in search in Schizophrenia

Effort-based decision-making is linked to the motiatonal deficits seen in negative symptoms in schizophrenia, and several paradigms have been developed to measure motivation and effort. However, there is substantial research suggesting that cognitive deficits affect these processes, and current paradigms do not consider how cognitive functioning may affect effort-based decision-making. We here use a task inspired from ethology, the cache retrieval paradigm, to measure concomitantly cognitive ability and investment or motivation to find the cache. That is we measure precision of visual short-term memory, implicit metamemory, search effort and by using a mathematical model compute the subjective costs of searching. In a study on non-clinical participants we found that the more positive symptoms one has, the worse the precision of one’s memory, but metamemory and effort spent searching for the cache was not affected. In study 2 patients’ memory was worse but computing the subjective costs yielded no group differences. Our results show intact implicit representation of uncertainties and acting on them in schizophrenia.