We are excited to share that our team has been awarded nearly €6 million in funding from the Wellcome Trust to investigate how the brain makes decisions—and why this process can become disrupted in mental illness.

Every day, we make decisions both big and small. But for people with mental health conditions like schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), decision-making can become a major struggle. Some decide too quickly based on little evidence—a pattern known as “jumping to conclusions.” Others become stuck in doubt, unable to decide at all.

Starting in February 2026, we will launch the largest study to date on these patterns. Using functional MRI, we will scan the brains of 150 people with schizophrenia and 150 with OCD to explore what happens in the brain when decisions go wrong. A key focus will be dopamine, a brain chemical that plays a crucial role in how we gather and process information before deciding. With both human data and mouse models, we aim to uncover how dopamine affects decision-making.

This project brings together international experts from Tübingen, the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, the National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences in Bangalore, and Fundació de Recerca Clínic Barcelona.

Our ultimate goal is to create better treatments that directly address the way people with schizophrenia and OCD make decisions—helping those who act too fast or can’t decide at all.

We are currently recruiting for multiple positions to join our team on this exciting journey. If you’re interested in being part of this groundbreaking work, please visit: https://devcompsy.org/join-the-lab/ for more details.

For the full press release, please see here.