All posts tagged: Mental Health

Fluctuations in motivation and decision-making

Today, will you socialise after work or stay at home? Will you do exercise or relax and watch tv? How do you decide whether its worth making extra effort? And why is it that some days this is easier than others? Previous research has shown that when deciding whether to do something effortful, people weigh up whether they think the benefits outweight the costs. However, in the real-world people seem to vary a lot in how willing they are to make effort over time. Some days we feel full of energy and motivation, and choose to make more effort whereas other days we lack motivation and choose to avoid effort. We do not have a good scientific understanding of what causes our choices to change like this, mostly because typically studies measure people’s decision making on just one single day. We investigated how people’s motivation changes using a study with smartphone games as people went about their daily life. We sent people notifications asking them to tell us how motivated, happy and tired they felt …

Professor Tobias Hauser Awarded FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize 2024

We are proud to announce that Professor Tobias Hauser has been honored with the prestigious FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize for 2024. This esteemed award, presented by the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) and the European Journal of Neuroscience (EJN), recognizes outstanding contributions to neuroscience research by early-career scientists. This accolade is a testament to Professor Hauser’s hard work and the impactful research conducted within the Developmental Computational Psychiatry lab. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to him for this well-deserved recognition and look forward to his continued contributions to the field of neuroscience!

Q&A with Lead Researcher Tobias Hauser Featured on Nature Mental Health

We are thrilled to announce that a compelling Q&A session with Tobias Hauser, head of the Developmental Computational Psychiatry lab, has been published on the Nature Mental Health website. In this exclusive interview, Tobias delves into his groundbreaking research in the advancing field of Computational Psychiatry and discusses innovative approaches to understanding and addressing mental health challenges. To read the full Q&A with Tobias Hauser, please visit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-024-00231-3

How exploration develops and is linked to impulsivity

Chocolate, hibiscus or spinach ice-cream? Many decisions we make require arbitrating between novelty (e.g., hibiscus) and the benefits of familiar options (e.g., chocolate). This is called the exploration-exploitation trade-off and humans rely on different exploration strategies to make their decision. Exploration strategies vary in performance and computational requirements. The simplest strategy, value-free random exploration, is to ignore prior knowledge and to choose entirely randomly. Such strategy may lead to suboptimal performance (e.g., choosing the disgusting spinach ice-cream), but allows to spare cognitive resources. This is of particular interest when access to cognitive resources is limited and prior knowledge uncertain, such as in development and mental health disorders. In a cross-sectional developmental study, we demonstrate that value-free random exploration is used more at a younger age, in line with the idea that we need to spare more cognitive resources at an earlier age as our brain is still developing. Additionally, in a large-sample online study, we show that value-free random exploration is specifically associated to impulsivity, suggesting an adaptive role for impulsivity, i.e., a way to …

Brain Explorer Research App released

Why do most mental health illnesses first manifest before adulthood? Our group has launched a new smartphone app to investigate how brain development is linked to mental health in a new citizen science project. The Brain Explorer app (www.brainexplorer.net) uses the latest state-of-the-art insights from neuroscience research to investigate brain functions in fun and entertaining games for young and old. By playing these games, people can learn about their own brain functions, and at the same time help the researchers to better understand how brain functions are related to the emergence of mental health problems. “We know that the brain changes substantially during adolescence”, says Dr Tobias Hauser, lead scientist on the project, “but we do not know how impaired brain development causes mental health problems. This app will help us understand why mental health problems arise during adolescence.” A better understanding of how abnormal brain development leads to mental health problems will allow researchers to build new models to predict emerging psychiatric illnesses and can help develop novel interventions. Everyone can contribute to research …