Patients with schizophrenia are impaired when learning in the context of pursuing rewards.

Recent findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have a probabilistic learning impairment that is selective to learning from positive, relative to negative, feedback (Gold et al., 2012), and is more compromised in those with worse negative symptoms (Waltz et al., 2010). This is consistent with evidence linking motivational and affective symptoms of schizophrenia with dysfunctional signaling across neural systems in the dopamine-mediated reward network (Gold et al., 2008; Waltz et al., 2009; Maia and Frank, 2011). While prior studies have examined this selective learning impairment using tasks comprised of intermixed positive and negative trial types that collapse feedback and reward outcome together, an extension of this work would aim to isolate and examine the impact of motivational context. As such, we designed a task, presented in two separate Gain and Loss conditions, in which feedback was held constant, and the outcome was varied with respect to accumulating gains or avoiding losses. It was hypothesized that there would be an effect ofmotivational context, such that patients would perform better in the Loss condition despite identical types of feedback.