Role of the Decision-Making Reference Point in Cognition and Psychopathology

New York University School Of Medicine, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary Mood disorders are characterized by a tendency to subjectively evaluate objectively positive outcomes in a negative light. A fundamental feature of nearly all standard models of decision- making is the idea that the subjective value of any choice option is shaped by one’s internal expectation, or ‘reference point’. Using behavioral decision-making tasks informed by an understanding of how human expectations are set, here propose to test the hypothesis that affective mood impacts the decision-making reference point—the computational instantiation of our expectations—and thus drives shifts in subjective value that mark mood pathologies like major depressive disorder (MDD). In our first Aim we seek to establish that mood correlates with the static state of the reference point in health choosers and that in mood disorders, principally MDD, the level of pathology correlates with the easily and objectively measured reference point. In the second aim we propose to extend these tools to correlate the rate of dynamic reference point resetting with mood state and depressive symptoms in healthy and pathological populations. We hypothesize that developing a neurocomputational framework for understanding the role of the reference point in psychopathology may offer a new construct for use in the RDoC framework.