Dr Vanessa Scholz | Understanding motivational biases in decision making – Individual differences and the role of psychiatric symptoms

Large inter-individual variability in symptom presentation within a psychiatric diagnosis and substantial symptom overlap between psychiatric disorders have raised doubts about whether current categorical diagnostic systems are suitable for guiding clinical research. Recently, international efforts have therefore focused on understanding psychiatric disorders in terms of disturbances in the underlying cognitive and motivational processes across diagnostic boundaries (e.g. Research Domain Criteria, RDoC).

Changes in motivational processes represent a core feature of many psychiatric disorders, like depression, impulse control disorders or addiction. Examining whether certain motivational features are specifically related to clinical symptoms could therefore be crucial for improving our general understanding of the driving forces of clinical symptoms. This knowledge might help us determine whether abnormal motivational processes represent a potential target for interventions aimed at reducing clinical symptoms by normalizing disturbed motivational processing. For this, the first key step will be to understand the computational and neural mechanisms that underlie these processes in the general population.

This talk will present preliminary data from a pilot study in which we aimed to assess how individual differences in psychiatric symptoms, particularly compulsions, mediate the impact of motivation on behaviour, using a combination of online data collection and computational modelling.

Poster