CCNP Seminar: Ugne Ziausyte (MD/PhD Student)

“An upcoming study on latent cause inference in disorders of compulsivity”

Speaker: Ugne Ziausyte
MD/PhD Student, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers University

Date and Time: Wednesday, October 7, 10-11am EDT (Eastern)

Zoom link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/94117265887?pwd=lmaGLwwbJ7buoK4aOMHofVvOWo64AX.1

Compulsivity is characterized by repetitive, self-deleterious behavior, often performed despite the knowledge of its disruptive effects on the pursuit of long-term goals. While classically characterized as a symptom driven by overactive habit systems, recently, alternative conceptualizations have emerged. In this talk, I will introduce an upcoming study that investigates how compulsivity may be explained through the lens of latent cause inference – a theory describing how people understand their environment by categorizing their experiences into shared, unobservable causes – in populations with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or alcohol use disorder (AUD), two canonical disorders of compulsivity.  After providing a methodological overview of the novel task designed for this study, I will describe the behavioral and neural hypotheses in detail and share predictions for study results.