The NeuroScience in Psychiatry Network Project and the adolescence of computational psychiatry

The NeuroScience in Psychiatry Network (NSPN) studies brain development during adolescence and coming-of-age. I will present an overview of this Cambridge-UCL project to provide context for our work on computational tasks that probe young peoples' decision making. Over eight hundred young people participated in our accelerated longitudinal cognitive battery study. We were thus able to obtain a bird's eye view of decision-making in this population. This revealed that decisision-making in the individual is characterized by one global factor reflecting the efficiency of decision-making, as well as domain-specific factors. We term this general factor, which shares about a quarter of its variance with IQ,  'decision acuity'. Key contributors to decision acuity included low temporal discounting, model-based thinking, daring to trust and especially low decision noise. However, decision-making indices influenced young people's propensity to report psychiatric symptoms less powerfully than we hypothesized. The precise patterns of association observed between cognition, demographics and symptoms, for exampe between high temporal discounting, poverty and misbehaviour, then motivated us to look at the effect of poverty on brain development. We found that childhood poverty is associated with reduced rates of myelin growth later, during coming-of-age. The effect was surprisingly independent of 'known suspects' such as IQ. I will conclude by offering some thoughts on the lessons of this project for computational psychiatry. In a sense, studies like NSPN are forming the adolescence of computational psychiatry itself. It is full of scientific potential and idealism but it is also starting to experience the surprises, contradictions and uncertainties which form its rites of passage to scientific adulthood.

Further information: ion.fil.brainmeetings@ucl.ac.uk