$16M Grant to Study Mental Health Disorders

Researchers at Rutgers and Princeton Universities are going to use a $16 million federal grant award to collaborate on several research projects aimed at better understanding a key brain process that may cause disruption in mental health disorders. The National Institute of Mental Health (NINH) awarded the five year grant to the faculty at Rutgers Brain Health Institute (BHI) and their colleagues at Princeton.

The research team is going to study "latent cause inference", which is a process where humans infer the hidden (latent) causes of events for perceiving, learning, and decision-making. Changes in this cognitive process are thought to underlie a wide range of mental health disorders, such as anxiety, compulsive behaviors, and schizophrenia.

The initiative will use a computational psychiatry approach that uses interdisciplinary methods including neuroimaging and computational modeling to explore brain function and to understand how to best treat mental disorders.

"The grant funding will advance our understanding of mental health disorders, but also push the boundaries of computational psychiatry", said Cary Aston-Jones, Murray and Charlotte Strongwater Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and Brain Health, and Director of BHI. "This program will be a major advancement related to mental health research, with the potential to fundamentally reshape the diagnosis, understanding, and treatment of mental health disorders."

The collaborative program will span four interconnected projects to be led by BHI faculty and Princeton researchers. Each project when undertaken is designed to uncover different aspects of latent cause inference and its impact on mental health.

Specific projects will investigate:

1. Project 1 will address the "Latent Cause Inference as a Fundamental Cognitive Process" and will investigate the relationship between individual differences in latent cause inference and dimensional mental health symptoms

• Project 2 will explore "Latent Cause Inference in Compulsion", a novel interpretation of compulsive disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug misuses
• Project 3 "Latent Cause Inference in Anxiety" will examine the interaction between latent cause inference and memory processes and how failures in this interaction can contribute to anxiety disorders
• Project 4 "Neural Mechanisms Underlying Latent Cause Inference" will probe the neural mechanisms of latent cause inference using high density neuronal recordings

The four projects will be supported by behavioral testing and clinical assessment, computational modeling, and neuroimaging.