Event:

MSNE Guest talk by Dr. Quentin Huys

https://www.mps-ucl-centre.mpg.de/person/104585

Date and Venue:
November 22nd 2022 - 7 PM - ZOOM

Registration required: https://wiki.tum.de/display/eifak/MSNE+Guest+Talk+-+Dr.+Quentin+Huyes
(zoom credentials are provided in the registration confirmation email)

This talk is a MSNE-Student hosted talk and part of MSNE Speakers series.
Host: Thomas Schwarz (MSNE, TUM)

Cognitive Mechanisms in Psychotherapy

Despite extensive research, the cognitive processes mediating the impact of psychotherapeutic interventions remain poorly understood, and as a result difficult to quantify. Identifying such mechanisms is likely to be extremely helpful: it could help target interventions better, could support dosing therapy through monitoring, and could heighten the speed at which new interventions can be developed. Mechanisms research in psychotherapy has described a number of key difficulties to achieving this. In this and the next talk, we ask whether advances in cognitive computational neuroscience might provide some support.

Specifically, the question is whether precise cognitive probes might identify specific mechanisms of interventions. In support of this, I will first describe a pilot study in participants undergoing an adapted behavioural activation therapy. Though small, this suggests that the therapeutic effect of specific interventions may be related to the impact on computationally defined cognitive mechanisms. However, the study has substantial limitations, and calls, in the first instance, for validation of the basic premise: that computationally defined cognitive mechanisms are actually sensitive to psychotherapeutic interventions. I will then move to present preliminary results from two strands of experiments examining whether interventions derived from components of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) are able to shift computationally-derived measures of their proposed psychological substrates. The first strand examines whether planning or values-based interventions based on behavioural activation (the `B’ in CBT) change measures of effort and reward sensitivity during effort-based decision-making. The second strand examines whether a psychoeducation intervention based on cognitive restructuring (the `C’ in CBT) is able to influence propensity to attribute events to internal (vs external) and global (vs specific) causes. Findings from both strands will be discussed with respect to challenges in developing brief, reliable, engaging, and user-acceptable measures of cognition. Overall, this outlines some early new results in using computational methods to understand therapeutic processes in the psychotherapy for depression.