Talk abstracts > Matilde Vaghi (University of East Anglia)

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Matilde Vaghi - University of East Anglia

Friday, June 2^nd

Talk Session 4: Alteration of decisions in psychiatry

14h30 - 15h

Adaptive learning and precision functional mapping in obsessive-compulsive disorder. 

When navigating the environment, we often have to act on incomplete and fragmented information. Typically, incoming information is processed to reduce uncertainty to make more accurate inferences about the causal structure of the environment and act accordingly. In such situations, decisions that we make are guided by the outcomes of similar decisions made in the past. However, we have recently shown that patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder display a behaviour which does not seem to consider experiences from an extended period, and instead it is constantly influenced by upcoming new information. Here, I will discuss neuroimaging evidence which might account for the brain mechanisms underlying such behaviour and entail fronto-striatal circuits. I will also discuss preliminary findings to make a case for the need to depart from traditional approaches which entail analysis of limited data from each individual and rely on inferences based on subjects’ averages, which obscure subject-specific patterns of brain organization. Additionally, the traditional cross-sectional focus provides limited insight into whether observed effects are stable over time or state dependent. This is a major limitation as psychiatric disorders exhibit significant within-subject symptomatic fluctuations over days/months, which can be influenced by therapeutic interventions. I will discuss how moving away from this approach can pave a new avenue towards personalized brain interventions to ameliorate psychiatric symptoms and promote behavioural change.