Conférence CRNL - Computational psychiatry: Lessons from dopamine’s role in the motivational and cognitive control of behaviour

I will illustrate the value of computational cognitive modeling for psychiatry by taking you with me on a short tour through a set of recent studies that have combined human neuroimaging and/or psychopharmacology with computational modeling of cognition and behavior.  Specifically, I will illustrate the relevance of the dopaminergic reinforcement learning story and then demonstrate the value of learning modeling for explaining and predicting progression of psychiatric problems in Parkinson’s disease. The work also begins to elucidate how increases in the major ascending monoamines, like dopamine, can help us adapt flexibly to the environment around us. Together, these studies demonstrate how model-based inference of latent computational processes can help us uncover the basis of clinically relevant individual variability in disease progression and treatment effects, while also providing putative targets for preventative interventions. 

Bio:

Roshan Cools is Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry at the department of psychiatry of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre and principal investigator at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging.

Roshan Cools studies the chemistry of the adaptive mind: the motivational and cognitive control of human behaviour and its modulation by the major ascending neuromodulators (in particular dopamine and serotonin).

http://www.roshancools.com/roshan-cools

For a biosketch click here.

For more see: http://www.ru.nl/people/donders/cools-r/