A Decision Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Real-World Addiction Outcomes

There is unprecedented interest in cognitive neuroscience approaches to psychiatry that can provide novel, mechanistic insights about mental illness. Most such applications have emphasized static, trait-like differences across psychiatric populations or from health, but this may not fully capture clinical reality or need. Almost all psychiatric disorders are characterized by some stereotyped and dynamic shifts in their clinical features (symptom exacerbation, relapse) that are of primary interest in treatment.

Addiction in particular, considered a preeminent disorder of decision making, is almost exclusively defined in its chronic stages by its temporal course, whereby individuals transition between periods of abstinence and drug use. In this talk, I will present recent work leveraging serial longitudinal designs and “decision neuroscience” that aims to capture the cognitive decision-making processes underlying these transitions in people with opioid use disorders. I will also present brain imaging data that attempts to link these clinical and behavioral changes with changes in neural function, to identifying common neural substrates and potential targets for intervention. A more refined approach that considers the temporal aspects of addiction might facilitate the real-world clinical utility of basic cognitive neuroscience research.

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About the Speaker

Anna Konova, PhD

Dr. Konova completed her PhD in Integrative Neuroscience with Rita Z. Goldstein at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Stony Brook University. She was then a postdoctoral fellow with Paul W. Glimcher at the Center for Neural Science at NYU. At Rutgers, Anna directs the Addicition and Decision Neuroscience Lab which studies the computational and neural basis of human decision-making in health and addiction.

For more information, please contact:

Dominic Fareri, PhD
516.877.4824
neuroscience@adelphi.edu