Thank you! Looking forward to the next steps now 😊

Huge thank you to my co-authors (including @michellenaessens.bsky.social) and all our wonderful volunteers 🥰

I feel old - does that count? 😂

We did also find an age effect with older individuals having higher levels of precision. This ties in with past research to suggest that older groups rely more on their prior beliefs.

I certainly think this makes sense as they've had more years to compile evidence that their beliefs are correct 😄

Thank you! We're hoping it may certainly open up some new avenues to treatment for individuals with clinical levels of apathy (both behavioural and pharmacological).

Or would you sit, apparently indifferent to the cold? ❄️

This idea is slightly different to existing cognitive theories which focus on apathy as a result of being insensitive to reward or effort avoidant.

In a way - we propose that a lack of precise beliefs about how our actions influence the world around us leads to apathy. As an example, if you had no confidence (an imprecise belief) that putting on a jacket would make you warmer - would you bother putting on the jacket?

[5] This study provides evidence that apathy may be caused my imprecise prior beliefs on action outcomes and opens new avenues to understand and treat apathy in clinical conditions 💊

[4] Using dynamic causal modelling of task-based MEG, we also find evidence that lower levels of prior precision are associated with lower levels of prefrontal superficial pyramidal gain AND slower (higher) GABA time constants.

[3] Our study finds strong evidence for a correlation between the precision of prior beliefs on action outcomes and apathy in healthy adults, such that higher levels of trait apathy are linked to lower levels of precision.

This relationship is primarily driven by behavioural apathy.

[2] We predict that precision of prior beliefs on actions is reflected in connectivity across the prefrontal-motor decision-making hierarchy.

This dysconnection may be driven by a loss of self-regulation (gain) on prefrontal superficial pyramidal neurons - important for tuning neural oscillations.

[1] In this preprint we highlight the potential of a framework based on apathy as a loss of precision on the prior expectations of action outcomes.

In essence, expectations on actions are so imprecise that there is little/no difference between an environment influenced by action versus non-action.