Deanna Barch
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Washington University in St. Louis

Mechanisms of Motivational Impairments in Psychosis

Psychiatric disorders involving psychosis are typically associated with hallucinations and delusions. However, hedonic and motivational impairments are a frequent additional component of psychotic disorders that causes significant disability and functional impairment.  Unfortunately, current treatments do little to improve such impairments in psychosis, in part due to a lack of understanding of the mechanisms that lead to such deficits. This talk will overview a program of research focused on understanding the neural and psychological processes that may be contributing to such motivational impairments in psychosis.  Our work suggests that such impairments do not reflect deficits in immediate hedonic experience or responses to incentives, or alterations in putatively striatally mediated prediction errors as reflected in either computational analyses of either behavior of functional imaging data.  However, our data suggest that such motivational impairments may reflect challenges in the representation and maintenance of incentive information that should normally serve to drive behavior, processes that are supported in part by neural circuits involving dorsal frontal/parietal and cingulo-opercular networks.  Further, such motivational impairments in psychosis may also reflect impairments in the computations associated with cognitive and physical effort allocation, which relate to hedonic and goal directed behavior in every day life.

A pizza lunch will be served at 11:45am. The seminar will run from 12:00pm – 1:30pm.