Context-dependent effects of ketamine on emotional evidence integration

Ketamine modulated temporal weighting of emotional evidence integration in a continuous face-tracking task, shifting reliance between recent and past information depending on environmental volatility.

• Why it matters: Emotion understanding depends on integrating noisy affective cues as states change, but prior work often used static or discrete stimuli, leaving volatility effects and drug modulation unclear.
• What they did: Participants completed a continuous emotional evidence integration task across different environmental volatility levels in online (n=92) and in-person (n=29) cohorts, then underwent a double-blind, placebo-controlled within-subject ketamine test about 1.5 hours post-infusion.
• The result: In stable environments, participants integrated over longer timescales, while volatility increased weighting of recent evidence; ketamine further shifted this balance, suggesting dynamic adaptation relevant to affective disorders.

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