Pilot Study on the Effects of Psilocybin on Belief Updating and Insight Formation

Summary

The primary aim of this phase I mechanistic pilot study is to evaluate the effects of psilocybin on aspects of cognition in healthy adult volunteers. Up to 24 participants will receive a single dose of either psilocybin or inert placebo, and they will be asked to complete several computer-based behavioral tasks measuring features of learning, belief updating, and abstraction. Participants will also complete measures of subjective experience and expectancy, as well as semi-structured interviews at follow up, to assess whether experience correlates with behavior. This is a Voluntary Submission.

Timeline

Start

2026-11

Primary completion

2027-11

Completion

2027-11

Publications

• Background Lehnert L, Littman ML, Frank MJ. Reward-predictive representations generalize across tasks in reinforcement learning. PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Oct 15;16(10):e1008317. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008317. eCollection 2020 Oct.
• Background Nassar MR, Wilson RC, Heasly B, Gold JI. An approximately Bayesian delta-rule model explains the dynamics of belief updating in a changing environment. J Neurosci. 2010 Sep 15;30(37):12366-78. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0822-10.2010.

Drugs

Indications

No indication recorded.