Context-dependent effects of ketamine on emotional evidence integration
- 1University of Oxford
Abstract
Understanding others' emotions requires continuously integrating noisy affective information as emotional states change over time. Research on emotion processing, however, has thus far focused on static environments or discrete events. Here, we developed a continuous emotional evidence integration task in which participants had to track the average emotional state in a rapidly changing sequence of faces under different levels of environmental volatility. This allowed us to examine emotion integration in changing environments. In online (n=92) and in-person (n=29) cohorts, participants integrated emotional information over longer timescales in stable environments while relying more strongly on recent evidence under volatility, consistent with principles established in perceptual decision-making. We further examined whether this process was modulated by ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist associated with evidence integration in the perceptual domain. We conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study and probed emotion integration during the post-acute period, approximately 1.5 hours after the infusion. Ketamine modulated the temporal weighting of emotional evidence, shifting the balance between recent and past information depending on environmental volatility. Together, these findings show that emotional evidence integration dynamically adapts to the statistical structure of the environment and that ketamine can further modulate this process, which may have relevance for affective disorders.
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BibTeX
@misc{rascu2026contextdependent,
title = {{Context-dependent effects of ketamine on emotional evidence integration}},
author = {M. Rascu and J. Grohn and S. Costi and C. Zangani and S. Agyapong and K. A. Smith and P. J. Cowen and L. T. Hunt and M. C. Klein-Flügge and L. A. Weber},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.30.762604},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.30.762604v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Context-dependent effects of ketamine on emotional evidence integration
AU - M. Rascu
AU - J. Grohn
AU - S. Costi
AU - C. Zangani
AU - S. Agyapong
AU - K. A. Smith
AU - P. J. Cowen
AU - L. T. Hunt
AU - M. C. Klein-Flügge
AU - L. A. Weber
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/30
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.30.762604
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.30.762604v1
AB - Understanding others' emotions requires continuously integrating noisy affective information as emotional states change over time. Research on emotion processing, however, has thus far focused on static environments or discrete events. Here, we developed a continuous emotional evidence integration task in which participants had to track the average emotional state in a rapidly changing sequence of faces under different levels of environmental volatility. This allowed us to examine emotion integration in changing environments. In online (n=92) and in-person (n=29) cohorts, participants integrated emotional information over longer timescales in stable environments while relying more strongly on recent evidence under volatility, consistent with principles established in perceptual decision-making. We further examined whether this process was modulated by ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist associated with evidence integration in the perceptual domain. We conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study and probed emotion integration during the post-acute period, approximately 1.5 hours after the infusion. Ketamine modulated the temporal weighting of emotional evidence, shifting the balance between recent and past information depending on environmental volatility. Together, these findings show that emotional evidence integration dynamically adapts to the statistical structure of the environment and that ketamine can further modulate this process, which may have relevance for affective disorders.
ER -