Brain meeting: Alisa Loosen

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Although obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is better understood and more treatable than ever, we still know very little about it. The disorder’s complexity is reflected in inconsistent neuropsychiatric findings that recent computational advances are trying to tackle. In this talk, I will identify three core themes relevant to a computational psychiatry of OCD: information seeking, confidence and cognitive flexibility. I will point out their consistent findings and open questions, which in turn will introduce our most recent research. The uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic enabled us to test the ecological validity of prominent lab-based information-seeking findings in OCD. Moreover, using a large-scale longitudinal study, we examined the psychometric quality of the predictive-inference task. This task has led to important, yet inconsistent, confidence findings in the field. Finally, in the last section of this talk, I will introduce our most recent patient-control study in which we aim to capture the link between cognitive flexibility and confidence across groups in an app-based decision-making paradigm.