CCNP Meetings

Claire Gillan
Professor in Psychology
Trinity College Dublin

Theories about the role of the brain’s habit system in compulsive disorders have been around for decades. Although progress has been made, most research has focused on goal-directed processes, i.e., the brain systems that help rein in habits. This is because habits themselves, although perhaps the most ubiquitous mode of action selection, remain among the most difficult phenomena to study empirically. This has led to a lack of mechanistic clarity in leading theories of compulsion and a prevailing ‘deficit’ model centred on decreased functioning of prefrontal brain regions that support cognitive control. This overlooks the potential adaptive value of a potentiated habit system in compulsivity: the rapid acquisition of stimulus–response representations that promote early automaticity, efficiency, and functional advantage. In this talk, I discuss new research that aims to remedy this and reveals ‘hidden habits’: patterns detectable through behavioural and electrophysiological methods, both inside and outside the lab, in healthy and transdiagnostic populations. Across various temporal horizons, I convey a mechanistic account of the role of habit in compulsive disorders that separates state from trait, risk from resilience, and benefits versus costs. Given the clear benefits of habits in everyday life, I conclude by considering what a neurodiversity-informed framework for compulsivity might entail.

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Golia Shafiei
CIHR Postdoctoral Fellow | PennLINC
Department of Psychiatry (OxCIN)
University of Pennsylvania

Major mental illnesses are increasingly understood as disorders of brain development. Neuroimaging studies of brain development can help track healthy brain maturation and have the potential to identify deviations from normal development linked to psychopathology. However, large and diverse samples are required to capture reliable neurodevelopmental patterns on the population level. While it is possible to aggregate data across multiple resources, data aggregation is not a straightforward process given the differences in neuroimaging and psychiatric phenotyping protocols used by independent studies. To this end, we introduce Reproducible Brain Charts (RBC), an open data resource that integrates data from five large and prominent studies of brain development in youth from three continents. We used bifactor models to generate harmonized psychiatric phenotypes that capture major dimensions of psychopathology. Additionally, we applied rigorous quality assurance protocols and used uniform and consistent pipelines to carefully curate and process neuroimaging data in a reproducible manner. All RBC data–including harmonized psychiatric phenotypes, unprocessed neuroimaging data, and fully processed imaging derivatives–are publicly shared without a data use agreement via the International Neuroimaging Data-sharing Initiative. Taken together, RBC facilitates large-scale, robust, and reproducible research in developmental and psychiatric neuroscience.

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Miriam Klein-Flügge
Assistant Professor, Wellcome Henry Dale and ERC-UKRI Fellow
Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (OxCIN)
University of Oxford

In this talk, I will present recent work examining deep subcortical circuits and their interactions with prefrontal cortex during affective decision-making. I will focus on three complementary strands of research that together inform our understanding of these networks. First, I will describe progress in resolving small subcortical structures that are critical for emotional and motivational processes—such as the amygdala and hypothalamus—at the level of individual subnuclei. Using high-resolution neuroimaging, we show nucleus-specific patterns of brain connectivity that explain variance in mental well-being, including individual differences in negative affect and stress. Second, I will discuss advances in causal approaches that allow us to move beyond correlational descriptions of function and directly manipulate activity non-invasively in deep brain circuits. Using transcranial ultrasound stimulation, we have characterised the causal contribution of the basolateral amygdala to affective approach–avoidance decisions, and ongoing work extends this work to examine causal roles of prefrontal and striatal regions in affective behaviour. Third, across multiple domains, we are beginning to move beyond the timescale of individual trials to study intermediate, more naturalistic timescales. This work aims to characterise how background contextual features shape motivation, social behaviour, reward learning, and emotion processing. Taken together, our work in human cognitive neuroscience has moved from correlational studies with coarser anatomical and functional resolution toward causal investigations of deep subcortical-cortical brain circuits at the functional scale of individual nuclei and using timescales of increasing relevance for flexible human behaviour. We believe this is an important step towards understanding the neural mechanisms underlying affective decision-making across health and disease.

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Payam Piray
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
University of Southern California

Adaptive learning requires distinguishing two causes of uncertainty, moment-to-moment stochasticity in observations and environmental volatility, that demand opposite adjustments to learning rate. Yet both increase experienced noise, making their dissociation computationally difficult and prone to systematic errors. I will present a computational framework, behavioral paradigm, and large-scale data investigating how humans dissociate these two sources of noise, and how this process gives rise to two kinds of learning failure.

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Silvia Lopez-Guzman
Chief
Unit on Computational Decision Neuroscience
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) | National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

An individual’s decisions reflect their goals, but decisions can sometimes be maladaptive and short-sighted. Powerful affective and motivational states like craving or stress can bias choices towards higher immediate gratification at the expense of future wellbeing. What are ways in which these effects can be minimized or managed? Awareness of one’s own physical, emotional, and cognitive state may be key to regulation, but these abilities have traditionally only been measured through self-report questionnaires. I will introduce a novel computational framework for measuring metacognition for value-based decision-making such as impulsive or risky decisions. With this computational approach, I will present work that shows that these metacognitive computations are both trait-like and domain general, as well as susceptible to changes induced by stress and other affective states.

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Hannah Snyder
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Program
Brandeis University

Emerging adulthood is a key risk period for depression and anxiety, potentially in part because still-developing executive function is not adequate to fully cope with new roles and demands, increasing stress. I will discuss two lines of research which seek to better understand these risk factors. The first tests a risk pathway linking poor executive function to internalizing psychopathology via stress generation and repetitive negative thinking. The second further probes links between stress and internalizing psychopathology risk, focusing on the role of stressor appraisals and stress coping.

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Angela Radulescu
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychiatry
Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai

Bipolar disorder (BD) is marked by striking fluctuations in motivation and goal-directed behavior, yet the cognitive mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. In this talk, I will present a reinforcement learning (RL) perspective on BD that links learning and motivation within a unified computational framework. This approach aims to identify cognitive markers of BD, highlighting positive overgeneralization — the excessive spread of learned value across contexts — as a potential marker present outside of acute episodes. Modeling results show that heightened sensitivity in self-efficacy belief updating can produce overgeneralized value representations and goal-directed behaviors resembling (hypo)manic symptoms. Finally, this perspective helps reconcile puzzling findings from ongoing work on value-based attention in BD, offering a cohesive account of how learning mechanisms contribute to cognitive vulnerability across the bipolar spectrum.

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Nicole Rust
Professor
Director of Visual Memory Lab
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania

In 1998, Eric Kandel published the brilliant essay A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry. In it, he described a revolution to move psychiatry away from the psychoanalytic tradition (focused exclusively on the mind) to one that incorporated biology, with an emphasis on genetic inheritance and genetic expression. He predicted that this revolution would have a profound impact on psychiatry. While notable discoveries have been made in the 27 years since, those profound impacts have yet to be realized. For instance, one goal has long been to create biological tests (like blood tests and brain scans) to diagnose psychiatric conditions, and those tests still do not exist. In this talk, I will argue that a second revolution is happening in this space — one required to fulfill Kandel’s original vision. To illustrate these changes, I will update Kandel’s framework to incorporate emerging ideas. I will also caution (as Kandel did) that success will require interaction between practitioners focused on broader psychiatric considerations and those focused on more detailed biological insights.

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Nicole Karcher
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychiatry
Washington University School of Medicine

Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), including unusual thoughts and perceptual experiences, represent transdiagnostic markers of later diagnosable mental health concerns. Dr. Karcher’s research program focuses on identifying the genetic, cognitive, neural, and environmental mechanisms underlying PLEs, with the goal of clarifying pathways of vulnerability and resilience. Leveraging large-scale longitudinal datasets, including the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, this research applies advanced analytic approaches, such as machine learning and structural equation modeling, to characterize patterns of symptoms and risk factors over time. Findings to date demonstrate that PLEs are associated with widespread impairments across domains, including elevated polygenic liability for schizophrenia, cognitive deficits, and structural and functional neural alterations. Additionally, PLEs are strongly linked to environmental exposures, such as trauma life events, underscoring the multifactorial etiology of these experiences. Importantly, this research highlights that PLEs that are both persistent and distressing are associated with greater impairments across risk domains, pointing to a subset of youth at heightened risk for adverse outcomes. Taken together, this research advances understanding of the developmental origins of psychosis spectrum symptoms and provides a foundation for identifying targets for early detection and intervention efforts in youth.

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Tim Clare
Author, Poet, and Creative Writing Podcaster

Author Tim Clare shares his experience of spending a year researching and trying every intervention for anxiety and panic he could, in an effort to manage his severe anxiety and daily panic attacks. The book he wrote about it, Coward, is an exploration of where we are with anxiety research across a wide range of disciplines, the gulf between public perceptions of what we know and where the science actually is, and how every generation believes it lives in the Age of Anxiety.

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