Ugne Ziausyte
MD/PhD Student, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Rutgers University/Princeton University
Compulsivity is characterized by repetitive, self-deleterious behavior, often performed despite the knowledge of its disruptive effects on the pursuit of long-term goals. While classically characterized as a symptom driven by overactive habit systems, recently, alternative conceptualizations have emerged. In this talk, I will introduce an upcoming study that investigates how compulsivity may be explained through the lens of latent cause inference – a theory describing how people understand their environment by categorizing their experiences into shared, unobservable causes – in populations with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or alcohol use disorder (AUD), two canonical disorders of compulsivity. After providing a methodological overview of the novel task designed for this study, I will describe the behavioral and neural hypotheses in detail and share predictions for study results.