FriSem

Lynde Folsom, Department of Psychology, Stanford University (Professor Russell Poldrack, advisor)

Title: Laying the Experimental Foundations for a Mechanistic Understanding of Overcontrol

To date, the bulk of research on self control has focused on under-regulation (“impulsivity"), which characterizes individuals who abuse illicit substances and engage in antisocial behavior. While this left tail of the population distribution of self-control has been well-characterized, there is surprisingly little empirical research on its right tail, i.e. individuals who show over-regulation. Some have suggested that over-regulation (“overcontrol") is an important transdiagnostic endophenotype that drives maladaptive choice behavior across a spectrum of psychiatric illness that includes restrictive eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and some personality syndromes (Lynch, 2012). Recent work suggests that an influential computational framework for action control is a useful lens for considering the cognitive mechanisms underlying overcontrol.  This approach distinguishes between two systems for regulating behavior: a retrospective model-free system, which selects actions solely on the basis of reinforcement history, and a prospective model-based system that integrates reward experience with rules and context representations to create a forward model of the external world. In this talk, I will discuss the nascent construct of overcontrol, review work on model-based decision-making in syndromes characterized by overcontrol, articulate my planned program of research, and describe results from preliminary studies that will provide a strong empirical foundation for this program.