Hanneke den Ouden, Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

How to know what to do: Unravelling the neurobiology of biased learning and choice

Huge inter-individual variability in treatment effectiveness is one of the biggest challenges in psychiatry. Given that despite 5 decades of research no notable novel pharmacological treatments have been introduced, the biggest gain psychiatry is likely to achieve in the near future is improved ability to predict who responds to what medication. This large inter-individual variability makes clear that current practise of symptom-based diagnosis and treatment have reached their limit. Instead, recent international efforts have focussed on understanding psychiatric disorders in terms disturbances in underlying cognitive and motivational processes.

Changes in motivational processing and learning in particular are at the heart of many psychiatric disorders, like addiction, depression, and impulse control disturbances. To predict whether treatment may help to normalise disturbed motivational processing, the first key step is to understand a) the computational and neural mechanisms that subserve these processes in healthy individuals, and b) how individual differences in the baseline neural and cognitive states mediate effects of pharmacological drugs. In my research I work focussing particularly on unraveling the computational roles of dopamine and serotonin, the two neuromodulatory systems long implicated in motivational learning and choice. In my talk, I will present three studies in which we assess how individual differences in the dopaminergic state mediate the impact of motivation in biasing choice, using a combination of neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, behavioural genetics, and computational modelling.

Additional Information

Part of the colloquium series of the GRK 1589 "Sensory Computation in Neural Systems"

Organized by

Rekha Varrier / Philipp Sterzer