Abstract
Environmental cues, like the logo of a diner, may acquire reward-predictive and motivational properties and exert a powerful influence on decision-making, even when irrelevant to the decision. This influence can be adaptive when such cues facilitate the detection of environmental opportunities and favor optimal choice behavior. However, it can be maladaptive when the elicited course of action is either no longer appropriate, or difficult to control, as observed in compulsive behaviors at the core of addiction. Crucially, the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms through which environmental cues bias decision-making remain hotly debated, thus limiting its understanding. The goal of the present project is to test a novel mechanistic account of cue-guided decisions, which challenges current theories and is based on intimate and bidirectional links between decision, behavior, and the cortical motor system. We intend to provide converging evidence showing that the motor system is not downstream of the decision process, but causally contributes to cue-guided decision-making and the transition from its adaptive to maladaptive forms. Additionally, in a pre-clinical study, we will test the translational potential of this motor hypothesis for recovering from addiction. To achieve this, we will adopt a multimodal approach, spanning from experimental, computational, clinical, and cognitive neuroscience, conducting a series of behavioral, electrophysiological, and brain stimulation studies on healthy individuals and patients with addiction. The project will use computational models to integrate the experimental evidence within the project and to formally define the hypotheses. The computational models will help to rigorously specify the hypotheses and verify their plausibility. The models will also generate predictions and assist in the development of experiments by indicating the most relevant data to discriminate competing hypotheses. We will also use the same computational models to perform data analysis on the experimental results, fitting the models to individual subjects and assessing which of the modeled variables best account for subjects’ behavioral and electrophysiological variability. This computational phenotyping will be a first step to moving from models of normal functioning to models for clinical application. The results of the project will lead to a significant change in the perspective of the scientific community on the mechanisms driving cue-guided decision-making, by showing that action planning is at the core of, and co-occurs with, decision-making. Crucially, this new evidence will imply that although environmental stimuli can have a powerful influence on decision-making, they do so through a mechanism that can be selectively modulated. This will have important clinical implications, for the development of novel diagnostic and therapeutic tools, and even the prevention of addiction.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Giuseppe Di Pellegrino
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Psicologia "Renzo Canestrari"
Coordinator:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 175.106,00
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 93.106,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
12/12/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
