Speaker: Amrita Lamba, Ph.D., Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Rebecca Saxe Lab, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Date: Friday, March 21, 2025
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom (https://mit.zoom.us/j/92058835886)

Talk title: Neurocomputational mechanisms of disordered social interaction
Abstract: A core mission of computational psychiatry is to identify latent cognitive and neural dimensions underlying distinct phenotypic expressions of psychopathology—put simply, symptom profiles with a shared clinical label may not necessarily arise from a common underlying pathology. This heterogeneity in presentation, and possibly in underlying mechanism, presents a major hurdle for implementing effective and scalable interventions. In this talk, I will discuss how behavior in social interactions can help dissociate anxiety disorders, the leading clinical diagnosis in the United States and one of the most common comorbid diagnoses with autism spectrum disorders. I will first present data showing that processing uncertainty, causal attribution, and navigating social tension are core social cognitive dimensions that 1) shape social behavior and 2) individuals in the general population drastically vary along. I will then show that these dimensions can be simultaneously measured by combining computational models with economic games designed to elicit naturalistic social behavior. Using the Asymmetric Social Exchange (ASE) game, an economic game where participants actively manage uncertainty and social tension, I then show that social and generalized anxiety can be behaviorally dissociated in social interaction. Specifically, I will show evidence of a double dissociation in which social anxiety is associated with reduced expression of social preferences and more precisely tailoring one’s behavior to a partner. These behavioral patterns are well-captured by a Bayesian Reinforcement Learning model that produces more conformist, conflict-avoidant behavior. In contrast, generalized anxiety is associated with reduced uncertainty processing and increased aversive generalization, a pattern captured by the same model, which produces rigid and inflexible behavior. I will then present plans for future work to study the neural basis of social interaction with fMRI, potentially providing a window into dissociable neural pathways underlying social and generalized anxiety disorders.