Neurobiological Substrates of Social Behavior: A Neuroeconomic Framework

描述(由申请人提供)：目前的提案旨在研究健康成年人的社会学习神经机制，作为了解精神疾病对社会功能影响的先导。社交行为的改变往往是一系列惊人的神经精神障碍的首发症状。然而，尽管记忆、运动或情绪功能障碍很容易被认为是更严重的潜在疾病的症状，但决策缺陷往往被忽视，特别是在社会领域。此外，很少有行为测量或生物标记物来量化这种缺陷，部分原因是我们对潜在的神经机制及其与精神障碍的关系的了解有限。我们通过对目标导向的社会行为进行计算建模，并使用功能磁共振成像和局灶性病变患者的互补实验技术测试生成的预测，来做到这一点。特别是，我们专注于多巴胺的作用以及基底节和额叶皮质之间的相互作用，这两个共同对目标导向行为至关重要，并已知在各种疾病中受到影响。首先，我们将使用该模型，根据观察到的行为进行校准，得出用于功能神经成像实验的逐次试验回归方程。其次，模型本身的估计参数可用于跨健康组和患病组进行比较，或找到患病组的亚型。最后，可以将神经相关性和行为估计结合起来，以找到疾病的新的大脑行为标记。通过这种方式，我们试图为社会和非社会环境中的目标导向行为提供一个统一的描述，这有可能导致基于可观察行为和神经生物学测量的维度对精神障碍进行分类的新方法的发展。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The current proposal aims to study neural mechanisms of social learning in healthy adults as a precursor to understanding the impact of mental illnesses on social functioning. Changes in social behavior are often the first symptoms of a striking array of neuropsychiatric disorders. However, whereas disruptions in memory, motor, or emotional functioning are readily recognized as symptoms of more serious underlying conditions, decision-making deficits are often overlooked, particularly in the social domain. Furthermore, there exist few behavioral measures or biomarkers to quantify such deficits, due in part to our limited knowledge of the underlying neural mechanisms and their relation to mental disorders. We do so via a tight integration of computational modeling of goal-directed social behavior, and testing the predictions generated using complementary experimental techniques with both fMRI and focal lesion patients. In particular, we focus on the role of dopamine and interactions between the basal ganglia and frontal cortices, which are together critical for goal-directed behavior and known to be affected in a variety of disorders. First, we will use the model, calibrated on observed behavior, to derive trial-by-trial regressors for use in functional neuroimaging experiments. Second, the estimated parameters of the model themselves can be used to compare across health and diseased groups, or find subtypes of the diseased groups. Finally, the neural correlates and the behavioral estimates can be combined in order to find novel brain-behavior markers of diseases. In this way, we seek to provide a unifying account of goal-directed behavior in both social and non- social settings, which has the potential to lead to development of new ways of classifying mental disorders based on dimensions of observable behavior and neurobiological measures.