Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

Alexander Harris
Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University

Reward seeking is disrupted in a variety of psychiatric disorders impacted by stress. However, it remains unclear what neural activity is responsible for stress-induced disruptions in reward seeking. In this talk, I will describe our work using in vivo electrophysiology and optogenetic manipulations in freely moving mice demonstrating that a subpopulation of inhibitory neurons in the reward circuit form the link between acute stress and subsequent decreased reward anticipation. I will also share our ongoing work exploring the role of reward circuitry during the social buffering of stress.  

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Katharina Schmack
Department of Psychiatry
Francis Crick Institute & University College London

Is computational psychiatry more than a buzzword? This talk will explore how computational psychiatry can capture psychotic symptoms across species and facilitate biological investigations into psychosis. I will present a computational-behavioural approach for measuring hallucination-like perception in humans and mice, which has helped to elucidate a causal neural circuit mechanism relevant to psychosis. I will conclude by discussing the tremendous opportunities that arise from using computational psychiatry to unlock the toolkit of biological science for psychiatry.  

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Warren Mansell
Professor of Mental Health
Curtin University, Perth

Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) was first introduced by William T. Powers in 1960 to provide an alternative account of behaviour to the dominant behavioural theories and emergent cognitive theories at the time. Derived from the principles of classical control engineering, Powers proposed that behaviour is the control of perceptual input, and specified the computational framework to operationalise the purposive behaviour of living organisms, including humans. Control is the default functioning of our brain and bodies, and it runs smoothly unless conflict occurs – defined as having opposing goal states for the same variable. According to PCT, psychopathology is characterised by loss of control that is maintained by processes that exacerbate conflict and/or prevent the exploration of conflict within conscious awareness. I will provide an overview of my own work in this field including: (a) basic lab tests of PCT; (b) modelling of individualised sensorimotor control processes; (c) modelling of goal conflict resolution; (d) plans for modelling of mental health recovery for personalised interventions – known as Dynamic Catalysts.  

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Michael Treadway
Department of Psychology
Emory University

Despite the broad literature examining the causes and consequences of mood, the concept of mood remains to be ambiguous. Prior work suggests that reward, effort, and exploration each contribute to mood, yet most laboratory assessments have assessed the impact of these variables in isolation. In this talk, I will present data from six samples using a novel effortful exploration task. We find that effort expenditure, exploration, reward and their trial-wise prediction-errors are independent predictors of momentary mood. Importantly, effort appeared to have dual, opposing effects on mood: on one hand, increased effort expenditure predicted more negative mood, and on the other hand, reward predicted subsequent mood only when foraging required effort. Finally, I will present preliminary evidence supporting a causal role for dmPFC in the impact of effort on mood using temporal interference (TI), a novel non-invasive deep-brain stimulation method. Taken together, these data seek to advance our understanding of mood and shed light on the paradoxical nature of effort as having both value-enhancing and discounting effects.  

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Rebecca Kazinka
Department of Psychiatry
University of Minnesota Medical School

Persecutory ideation is a common experience in psychosis, yet also presents in other neuropsychiatric disorders and even in the general population. However, our understanding of the neural mechanism of persecutory ideation is relatively unclear. My work focuses on building a construct strongly related to persecutory ideation to better understand the associated neural processes that drive decisions. In this talk, I will present our findings showing that spite sensitivity, i.e., a worry that another person will intentionally incur a loss to ensure that you do as well, provides a model for understand persecutory ideation. We built a computational model of spite sensitivity using an economic game called the Minnesota Trust Game (MTG), which is a modified version of the trust game with two conditions in which the partner is either incentivized or disincentivized to behave fairly. Through several studies in undergraduates, individuals with psychosis, and monozygotic twins, we show that spite sensitivity predicts persecutory ideation and is associated with activation in the lateral OFC. This model provides a means of quantifying persecutory ideation and may be useful for future clinical applications.  

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Aaron Heller
Department of Psychology
University of Miami

The specific way emotions ebb and flow in life differentiate someone who has depression from someone who do not. Given such a central role for emotion in well-being and psychopathology, it is critical that we understand what causes emotion in everyday life and whether these emotional causes tell us anything about mental health. It is especially important to understand what causes real-world emotion because to be able change emotion we need to understand what drives it in the first place. Using a combination of mobile tracking, experience sampling, and functional neuroimaging methods, I will present studies addressing the role that deviations from expectations play in driving naturalistic emotion, that deviations from expectations drive emotion differently in people who are depressed from those who are not, and that deviations from expectations are learning signals that help explain how individuals may develop mental health difficulties. This work suggests that how we form, update, and respond to real-world expectations play a key role in promoting well-being as well as preventing psychopathology.  

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Melissa Brotman
Neuroscience and Novel Therapeutics Unit
National Institute of Health

The goal of the Neuroscience and Novel Therapeutics Unit (NNT) is to develop and test psychological treatments for anxiety and irritability, two of the most common and impairing pediatric mental health problems. Despite their prevalence and public health impact, advances in treatment have stalled. To capitalize on this opportunity, NNT deploys an experimental medicine approach. First, we identify and probe mechanistically relevant behaviors and corresponding brain-based dysfunction. Second, we develop interventions modifying putative behavioral and neural targets integrating in vivo, mobile metrics. Our work implicates two psychological processes in both anxiety and irritability: (1) aberrant threat processing, and (2) impaired inhibitory control. Exposure therapy, a behavioral technique, engages both threat (e.g., salience network) and inhibition (e.g., executive control networks). Exposure therapy is a first line treatment for anxiety disorders. However, the neural mechanisms mediating improvement remain unknown. Critically, the clinical application beyond fear-based disorders has only recently been considered. Both clinically impairing irritability and anxiety are stimulus-evoked, high arousal, negative valence states, with differential downstream behavioral manifestations.

In this presentation, I will present two studies. First, in a large, unmedicated sample of youth with anxiety disorders and healthy controls, we identified specific brain-based regions associated with clinical improvement in anxiety (e.g., fronto-parietal regions), as well as subcortical circuitry (e.g., amygdala) showing sustained dysfunction following exposure therapy. Second, because like fear, anger is an acute stimulus driven emotional state, we conceptualized, tested, and demonstrated efficacy for a novel application of exposure therapy for youth with impairing irritability and anger. I will also share some early work where we are augmenting our work on brain-based behavioral therapeutics by developing, assessing, and validating digital mobile health applications.

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Christine Constantinople
NYU Center for Neural Science
New York University

Midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons are thought to be critical for reinforcement learning as well as motor control. A major outstanding question for the field is understanding how dopamine can satisfy these dual functions within the striatum, the input structure of the basal ganglia. I will describe our ongoing efforts to reconcile these dual functions of dopamine using rats performing a value-based decision-making task that includes reward- and movement-related events at distinct time points. Fiber photometry measurement of DA release in dorsomedial striatum revealed that only some event-aligned phasic DA signals were accompanied by movement, the amplitude of which predicted the vigor of upcoming contralateral movements. Phasic DA in the absence of movement signaled reward prediction errors (RPEs) and modulated rats’ behavior on subsequent trials. Electrophysiological recordings in the dorsomedial striatum showed trial-by-trial changes in firing rates at RPE-associated events, but not at movement-associated events. These data demonstrate DA-dependent plasticity and behavioral change following RPE on a trial-by-trial basis. To explain the dual role of DA in supporting movement and learning at distinct time points within a single trial, we hypothesized that acetylcholine’s (ACh) effect on striatal cell excitability may act as a gating mechanism. Fiber photometry measurement of ACh release in DMS revealed a unique pre-burst rise in ACh at movement initiation, and dips at RPE events, and optogenetic activation of ACh cells reliably initiated movements and impaired learning. These data suggest that the neuromodulator acetylcholine dynamically gates whether dopamine in the striatum is used for learning or moving on a moment-by-moment basis.

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Nili Solomonov
Department of Psychiatry
Weil Cornell Medical College

Psychotherapy is effective in reducing depression. Yet, 40-60% of patients remain symptomatic at treatment end. Identifying brain‐based and clinical mechanisms of action that underlie symptomatic improvement can guide the development of neuroscience‐informed, scalable and effective interventions. Dr. Solomonov will present studies conducted using imaging and computational approaches to detect mechanisms of action and improve psychotherapies. Studies will focus on understudied populations, including middle‐aged and older adults, mothers with postpartum depression and healthcare workers suffering from depression and anxiety.ffort and critical dynamics in EEG data while participants perform various levels of the N-back working memory task.

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Peter Manza
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
National Institute of Health

The addictiveness of stimulant drugs such as methylphenidate (MP) depends crucially on how fast they raise dopamine in the brain. Yet the brain circuits underlying the rate dependency to drug reward have not been resolved. We used simultaneous PET-fMRI to link dynamic changes in brain dopamine signaling, functional brain activity/connectivity, and the self-reported experience of ‘high’ in 20 healthy adults receiving MP at different speeds: slow (oral 60mg) and fast (intravenous-IV 0.25mg/kg) doses in a double-blind, counterbalanced, placebo-controlled study. We estimated speed of striatal dopamine increases to oral and IV MP and then tested where brain activity/connectivity was associated with slow and fast dopamine kinetics. The two administrations produced dramatically different effects on brain functional activation and connectivity despite a comparable overall magnitude of dopamine increases. These data demonstrate how fast dopamine increases generate unique effects on brain function that have relevance for the addictive potential of drugs.

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