Integration of dynamic belief updating across mental disorders and contexts

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sebastian Gluth
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Developmental and Educational Psychology ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461947532

Understanding clinical and developmental manifestations of dynamic belief updating is critical for identifying the determinants of adaptive and maladaptive behaviour in an uncertain and changing world. The central goal of this Integration Project is to combine the data from the other projects of the Research Unit, thus allowing us to subject the proposed cascade of behavioural and physiological events of dynamic belief updating to large-scale analyses that cut across clinical dimensions as well as developmental and environmental contexts (i.e., threat, stress, reward, social). These analyses will be augmented by developing an advanced process model of learning and decision-making behaviour in the commonly used task. Furthermore, this project will help monitor the progress of the other projects with respect to meeting the integration goals and will offer support to achieve those goals and to implement project-specific requirements that are related to cognitive modelling. We will combine extensive modelling of behavioural and physiological data from the change-point task with latent-variable analyses of the rich information about socio-demographic, psychological, clinical and environmental characteristics from the individual projects. Cognitive modelling will be advanced by making use of recent developments in specifying the dynamics of decision-making in tasks with continuous response options. To support these advancements, we will conduct an eye-tracking study to test whether decision-making dynamics can be altered by changes of unexpected and expected uncertainty. To monitor the progress of the Research Unit with respect to meeting the integration goals, an Integration Team will be formed of experts from the computational, neuroscientific and clinical areas. This team will set up a working environment to distribute and share relevant materials and codes across the projects in an efficient manner. We will also offer workshops on cognitive modelling and data analysis of the change-point task, provide individual guidance for all members of the Research Unit, and organize regular methods meetings to foster the modelling expertise in the group. Based on combining a rich and large-scale dataset with extensive cognitive modelling, we expect the integration project to yield ground-breaking insights into the clinical, developmental, and environmental context-driven commonalities and differences of dynamic belief updating, which would be impossible to gain from single studies of individual projects alone.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5389: Contextual influences on dynamic belief updating in volatile environments: Basic mechanisms and clinical implications
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Rasmus Bruckner