Catherine E Myers

• PhD
• Researcher at VA New Jersey Health Care System

Background Head injuries are a major health care concern that can produce many long lasting cognitive, mental, and physical problems. An emerging literature indicates increased impulsivity in patients with a history of traumatic brain injury (TBI). In a recent study, Veterans with clinically-assessed history of mild TBI had increased cognitive, but...

Background Learning from feedback – adapting behavior based on reinforcing and punishing outcomes – has been implicated in numerous psychiatric disorders, including substance misuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression; an emerging literature suggests it may also play a role in suicidality. This study examined whether a feedback-based le...

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in avoidance behavior, and its applicability to clinical conditions such as anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addiction. In a computer-based avoidance task for humans, participants control an on-screen spaceship, shoot at enemy targets (appetitive cue) to gain points, and learn to respond...

Depression is highly comorbid among individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), who often experience unique challenges to accessing and benefitting from empirically supported interventions like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Given the role of reward processing in both depression and PD, this study analyzed a subset (N = 25) of participants who...

Korsakoff's syndrome (KS) is characterized by episodic memory impairment due to damage to the medial diencephalic structures. Although commonly associated with chronic alcoholism, starvation due to the hunger strike is one of its nonalcoholic causes. Learning the stimulus-response associations and transferring the just-learned associations to novel...

A 10‐Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex has been shown to increase dopaminergic activity in the dorsal striatum, a region strongly implicated in reinforcement learning. However, the behavioural influence of this effect remains largely unknown. We tested the causal effects of 10‐Hz stimulatio...

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the number of studies using evidence-accumulation models (such as the drift diffusion model, DDM) in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. These models go beyond observed behavior to extract descriptions of latent cognitive processes that have been linked to different brain substrates. Accordingly, it...

Background One personality type associated with poor health outcomes is distressed (Type D) personality which involves high levels of both social inhibition (SI) and negative affectivity (NA). Type D is also linked to psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, and depression. One mechanism through which pers...

Aim: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) was associated with increased plasma serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) autoantibodies in adults who experienced neurodegenerative complications. We tested whether the baseline presence of plasma serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) autoantibodies was a significant predictor of the two-year rate of cognitive decline in mi...

Background Neurocognitive testing may advance the goal of predicting near-term suicide risk. The current study examined whether performance on a Go/No-go (GNG) task, and computational modeling to extract latent cognitive variables, could enhance prediction of suicide attempts within next 90 days, among individuals at high-risk for suicide. Method...

Background 10-Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to increase dopaminergic activity in the dorsal striatum, a region strongly implicated in reinforcement learning. However, the behavioural influence of this effect remains largely unknown. Objective Here, we test...

Knowledge of how to effectively prevent suicide attempt (SA) in high suicide–risk patients who also misuse opioids is limited. In a subset of data from 36 participants with baseline opioid misuse in a randomized clinical trial testing adjunctive mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to prevent suicide among high suicide–risk veterans (n = 18 per trea...

Objective To test whether Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy to Prevent Suicide (MBCT-S) is associated with improvement in attentional control, an objective marker of suicide attempt. Method In the context of a randomized clinical trial targeting suicide risk in Veterans, computerized Stroop and emotion Stroop (E-Stroop) tasks were administered 3...

Gulf War Illness (GWI) is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a multi‐symptom illness having at least one symptom from two of three factors, which include: fatigue, mood‐cognition problems, and musculoskeletal disorders. The cluster of long‐term symptoms is unique to military personnel from coalition countries includi...

Data were collected from 40 Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) and 40 Sprague Dawley (SD) rats during an active escape-avoidance experiment. Footshock could be avoided by pressing a lever during a danger period prior to onset of shock. If avoidance did not occur, a series of footshocks were administered, and the rat could press a lever to escape (terminate shocks)...

Researchers have exerted tremendous efforts to empirically study how habits form and dominate at the expense of deliberation, yet we know very little about breaking these rigid habits to restore goal-directed control. In a three-experiment study, we first illustrate a novel approach of studying well-learned habits, in order to effectively demonstra...

Avoidance behavior is a typically adaptive response performed by an organism to avert harmful situations. Individuals differ remarkably in their tendency to acquire and perform new avoidance behaviors, as seen in anxiety disorders where avoidance becomes pervasive and inappropriate. In rodent models of avoidance, the inbred Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rat d...

Objective: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with an increased risk of late neurodegenerative complications via unknown mechanisms. Circulating neurotoxic 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) autoantibodies were reported to increase in subsets of obese type 2 diabetes having microvascular complications. We tested whether 5-HT2AR auto...

disease (PD) is a chronic, progressive neurodegenerative disorder, characterized by a loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta. Given that dopamine is critically involved in learning and other cognitive processes, such as working memory, dopamine loss in PD has been linked both to learning abnormalities and to cognitive dy...

Aims: To evaluate temporal trends in racial/ethnic groups in rates of serious hypoglycemia among higher risk patients dually enrolled in Veterans Health Administration and Medicare fee-for-service and assess the relationship(s) between hypoglycemia rates, insulin/secretagogues and comorbid conditions. Methods: Retrospective observational serial...

Neurocognitive detection of suicidal states has the potential to significantly advance objective risk assessment. This goal requires establishing that neurocognitive deficits fluctuate around the time of a suicide attempt. The current study therefore evaluated whether neurocognitive performance is temporally related to suicide attempt, in a sample...

Researchers have exerted tremendous efforts to empirically study how habits form and dominate at the expense of deliberation, yet we know very little about breaking these rigid habits to restore goal-directed control. In a three-experiment study, we first illustrate a novel approach of studying well-learned habits, in order to effectively demonstra...

Background/Objective: Coping styles play a role in how individuals respond to stress and therapy. One aspect of coping which has been linked to adverse outcomes including anxiety disorders and PTSD is avoidance. However, a tendency to avoid may affect the accuracy of paper and pencil inventories used to identify avoidant temperaments. Previously, w...

Annual rates of emergency department visits or hospitalizations for hypoglycemia (HYPO) were evaluated using a serial cross-sectional study design (2004-2015) of VHA/Medicare enrolled patients. Subjects were ≥65 years receiving secretagogues only (Secr), or insulin with or without Secr (Ins), and who had HbA1c value(s). Separately for Secr/Ins grou...

Alcohol-dependent individuals are often reported to use behavioral strategies both to escape from and avoid negative affective states, and also to approach positive affective states. However, there has been little examination of how these individuals acquire and express these types of behaviors. In this study, male adults meeting the International...

Although many individuals who experience a trauma go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the rate of PTSD following trauma is only about 15–24%. There must be some pre-existing conditions that impart increased vulnerability to some individuals and not others. Diathesis models of PTSD theorize that pre-existing vulnerabilities inter...

Objective: This study examined learning functions in short-term cocaine users and control participants. Method: Seventeen active cocaine users (reporting 3.5 mean years of cocaine use) and seventeen non-cocaine-using controls (with similar reported levels of alcohol and marijuana use) were compared on tasks measuring different aspects of learnin...

Using high‐resolution resting state fMRI, the present study tested the hypothesis that ABCA7 genetic risk differentially affects intra‐medial temporal lobe (MTL) functional connectivity between MTL subfields, versus internetwork connectivity of the MTL with the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), in non‐demented older African Americans. Although the a...

Several personality factors have been implicated in vulnerability to addiction by impacting learning and decision making. One such factor is intolerance of uncertainty (IU), the tendency to perceive uncertain situations negatively and avoid them. Conditioned place preference (CPP), which compares preference for contexts paired with reward, has been...

Raw task data Contains raw data files from the conditioned place preference task for each participant.

Many individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) report experiencing frequent intrusive memories of the original traumatic event (e.g., flashbacks). These memories can be triggered by situations or stimuli that reflect aspects of the trauma and may reflect basic processes in learning and memory, such as generalization. It is possible that...

Details of diffusion drift modeling analysis

Fast, inexpensive, and noninvasive identification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) before clinical symptoms emerge would augment our ability to intervene early in the disease. Individuals with fully penetrant genetic mutations causing autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease (ADAD) are essentially certain to develop the disease, providing a unique opportu...

Substance dependence is thought to be mediated by abnormalities in cognitive abilities, but how this impacts decision-making remains unclear. This study aimed to test whether people who are opiate dependent differed from never-dependent controls in learning from reward and punishment or in the generalization of learning to novel conditions. Partici...

Studies of partial reinforcement in eyeblink conditioning have typically shown slower learning of a CS-US association when paired CS-US trials are interleaved with CS-alone trials. However, recent work has shown that CS-US learning is not slowed by interleaved US-alone trials. This discrepancy is surprising since both partial reinforcement protocol...

Personality factors such as behavioral inhibition (BI), a temperamental tendency for avoidance in the face of unfamiliar situations, have been identified as risk factors for anxiety disorders. Personality factors are generally identified through self-report inventories. However, this tendency to avoid may affect the accuracy of these self-report in...

U.S. Coast Guard (CG) personnel face occupational stressors (e.g., search and rescue) which compound daily life stressors encountered by civilians. However, the degree CG personnel express stress-related mental health symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) is understudied as a military branch, and littl...

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is the tendency to interpret ambiguous situations as threatening and having negative consequences, resulting in feelings of distress and anxiety. IU has been linked to a number of anxiety disorders, and anxiety felt in the face of uncertainty may result in maladaptive behaviors such as impulsive decision making. Alth...

SPSS file containing the full data set used in the study. (SAV)

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the most common non-motor manifestation of Parkinson’s disease (PD) affecting 50% of patients. However, little is known about the cognitive correlates of MDD in PD. Using a computer-based cognitive task that dissociates learning from positive and negative feedback, we tested four groups of subjects: (1) patients w...

While avoidance is a core symptom of PTSD, little is known about whether individuals with PTSD show a general cognitive bias to acquire and express avoidance, in situations not related to trauma or fear. Here, we used a computer-based task to examine operant acquisition and extinction of avoidance in participants with and without severe self-report...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop following exposure to a traumatic event. Re-experiencing, which includes intrusive memories or flashbacks of the trauma, is a core symptom cluster of PTSD. From an associative learning perspective, this cluster may be attributed to cues associated with the trauma, which have come to elicit symptoms...

Supplemental materials. Values of the means and standard errors used to construct data figures. (XLSX)

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can occur in the wake of exposure to a traumatic event. Currently, PTSD symptoms are assessed mainly through self-report in the form of questionnaire or clinical interview. Self-report has inherent limitations, particularly in psychiatric populations who may have limited awareness of deficit, reduced attention...

This study adapts a widely-used acquired equivalence paradigm to investigate how opioid-addicted individuals learn from positive and negative feedback, and how they generalize this learning. The opioid-addicted group consisted of 33 participants with a history of heroin dependency currently in a methadone maintenance program; the control group cons...

Recent work has found that personality factors that confer vulnerability to addiction can also affect learning and economic decision making. One personality trait which has been implicated in vulnerability to addiction is intolerance to uncertainty (IU), i.e., a preference for familiar over unknown (possibly better) options. In animals, the motivat...

Objective: Generalization is the application of existing knowledge to novel situations. Questions remain about the precise role of the hippocampus in this facet of learning, but a connectionist model by Gluck and Myers (1993) predicts that generalization should be enhanced following hippocampal damage. Method: In a two-category learning task, a...

Objective: Addiction is often conceptualized as a behavioral strategy for avoiding negative experiences. In rodents, opioid intake has been associated with abnormal acquisition and extinction of avoidance behavior. Here, we tested the hypothesis that these findings would generalize to human opioid-dependent subjects. Method: Adults meeting DSM-I...

Decisions based on trust are critical for human social interaction. We judge the trustworthiness of partners in social interactions based on a number of partner characteristics as well as experiences with those partners. These decisions are also influenced by personality. The current study examined how the personality trait of behavioral inhibition...

Computational modeling data The first tab contains LLE and AIC for each model. Parameter values for the best fit model are shown on the second tab.

Participant demographics and questionnaire scores Gender, age and score on the adult measure of behavioral inhibition for each participant with a summary of corresponding partner ratings and behavior in the trust game.

Raw data files from the trust game Text files containing data from each participant in the trust game. A separate line for each trial in the game indicates the type of partner (good, neutral or bad) for that trial, the face corresponding to the partner, whether the participant shared, and if so, whether the partner also shared.

Behavioral inhibition (BI), a tendency to withdraw from or avoid novel social and non-social situations, is a personality trait which can confer risk for anxiety disorders. Like many personality traits, BI is often assessed via self-report questionnaires where respondents rate themselves for frequency of certain behaviors or feelings. However, ques...

Recent work has found that behaviorally inhibited (BI) individuals exhibit enhanced eyeblink conditioning in omission and yoked training as well as with schedules of partial reinforcement. We hypothesized that spacing CS-US paired trials over a longer period of time by extending and varying the inter-trial interval (ITI) would facilitate learning....

Avoidance behavior is a critical component of many psychiatric disorders, and as such, it is important to understand how avoidance behavior arises, and whether it can be modified. In this study, we used empirical and computational methods to assess the role of informational feedback and ambiguous outcome in avoidance behavior. We adapted a computer...

This is the S1 file; it is a.zip file containing raw empirical data. It includes one.doc file per subject (199 files total), with output from the computer-based task described in the text. A “readme” file is included explaining how the output should be interpreted and providing basic demographic data for the subjects (ID, age, gender, experimental...

This is the S2 file; it is a.docx file containing the C code used to implement the RL model described in the text. Information contained in the file header describes how to use and run the program. (ZIP)

Elevated β-amyloid and impaired synaptic function in hippocampus are among the earliest manifestations of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Most cognitive assessments employed in both humans and animal models, however, are insensitive to this early disease pathology. One critical aspect of hippocampal function is its role in episodic memory, which involves...

The dentate gyrus (DG) and area CA3 of the hippocampus are highly organized lamellar structures which have been implicated in specific cognitive functions such as pattern separation and pattern completion. Here we describe how the anatomical organization and physiology of the DG and CA3 are consistent with structures that perform pattern separation...

Addiction is the continuation of a habit in spite of negative consequences. A vast literature gives evidence that this poor decision-making behavior in individuals addicted to drugs also generalizes to laboratory decision making tasks, suggesting that the impairment in decision-making is not limited to decisions about taking drugs. In the current e...

One interpretation of re-experiencing symptoms in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is that memories related to emotional information are stored strongly, but with insufficient specificity, so that stimuli which are minimally related to the traumatic event are sufficient to trigger recall. If so, re-experiencing symptoms may reflect a general b...

Altered medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and amygdala function is associated with anxiety-related disorders. While the mPFC-amygdala pathway has a clear role in fear conditioning, these structures are also involved in active avoidance. Given that avoidance perseveration represents a core symptom of anxiety disorders, the neural substrate of avoidanc...

Previous research has shown that trial ordering affects cognitive performance, but this has not been not tested using category-learning tasks that differentiate learning from reward and punishment. Here, we tested two groups of healthy young adults using a probabilistic category learning task of reward and punishment in which there are two types of...

Avoidance behavior involves learning responses that prevent upcoming aversive events; these responses typically extinguish when the aversive events stop materializing. Stimuli that signal safety from aversive events can paradoxically inhibit extinction of avoidance behavior. In animals, males and females process safety signals differently. These di...

The severity and number of reexperiencing symptoms (e.g., flashbacks) show considerable variability across individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One interpretation of reexperiencing symptoms invokes generalization: Specifically, the traumatic memory may be stored in such a way that neutral stimuli that only vaguely resemble some fe...

As a model of anxiety disorder vulnerability, male Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats acquire lever-press avoidance behavior more readily than outbred Sprague-Dawley rats, and their acquisition is enhanced by the presence of a discrete signal presented during the inter-trial intervals (ITIs), suggesting that it is perceived as a safety signal. A series of exp...

Avoidance in the face of novel situations or uncertainty is a prime feature of behavioral inhibition which has been put forth as a risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders. Recent work has found that behaviorally inhibited (BI) individuals acquire conditioned eyeblinks faster than non-inhibited (NI) individuals in omission and yoked par...

Avoidance is a core feature of anxiety disorders and factors which increase avoidance expression or its resistance represent a source of vulnerability for anxiety disorders. Outbred female Sprague Dawley (SD) rats and inbred male and female Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats expressing behaviorally inhibited (BI) temperament learn avoidance faster than male S...

Avoidance and its perseveration represent key features of anxiety disorders. Both pharmacological and behavioral approaches (i.e. anxiolytics and extinction therapy) have been utilized to modulate avoidance behavior in patients. However, the outcome has not always been desirable. Part of the reason is attributed to the diverse neuropathology of anx...

While avoidance behavior is often an adaptive strategy, exaggerated avoidance can be detrimental and result in the development of psychopathologies, such as anxiety disorders. A large animal literature shows that the acquisition and extinction of avoidance behavior in rodents depends on individual differences (e.g., sex, strain) and might be modula...

Avoidance behaviors, in which a learned response causes omission of an upcoming punisher, are a core feature of many psychiatric disorders. While reinforcement learning (RL) models have been widely used to study the development of appetitive behaviors, less attention has been paid to avoidance. Here, we present a RL model of lever-press avoidance l...

To test a prediction of our previous computational model of cortico-hippocampal interaction (Gluck and Myers [1993, 2001]) for characterizing individual differences in category learning, we studied young healthy subjects using an fMRI-adapted category-learning task that has two phases, an initial phase in which associations are learned through tria...

Behavioral Inhibition (BI) is an anxiety vulnerability factor associated with hypervigilance to novel stimuli, threat, and ambiguous cues. The progression from anxiety risk to a clinical disorder is unknown, although the acquisition of defensive learning and avoidance may be a critical feature. As the expression of avoidance is also central to anxi...

Aspects of stimulus-response (S-R) learning, mediated by striatal dopamine signaling, have been found to be altered in cocaine users relative to healthy controls. However, the influence of cocaine users' marijuana and alcohol use has not been accounted for. This study evaluated S-R learning and other neurocognitive functions in cocaine users while...

One barrier to interpreting past studies of cognition and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has been the failure in many studies to adequately dissociate the effects of MDD from the potential cognitive side effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) use. To better understand how remediation of depressive symptoms affects cognitive func...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms include behavioral avoidance which is acquired and tends to increase with time. This avoidance may represent a general learning bias; indeed, individuals with PTSD are often faster than controls on acquiring conditioned responses based on physiologically-aversive feedback. However, it is not clear whet...

Performance on reward and punishment trials across the course of the experiment, broken down into blocks of 40 trials (10 trials with each of the four stimuli). Mixed-model ANOVA with within-subject factors of trial type (2) and block (4) and between-subject factor of PTSS group revealed a significant effect of trial type (F(1,85) = 7.30, p = 0.008...

Performance of “Solvers,” defined as participants achieving at least 65% optimal responding on either reward or punishment trials. (A) Considering only the 15 participants in the control group and 25 in the PTSS group who met this criterion, the PTSS group still outperformed the control group on reward trials (t(38) = 3.05, p = 0.004) but not punis...

Model fit (LLE) as a function of performance on (A) reward and (B) punishment trials. LLE was positively correlated with performance (percent optimal responses) on punishment trials (r = 0.587, p<0.001); this partially reflects the fact that model fit will be greater for participants who demonstrated more deterministic behavior – typically, those p...

On-screen instructions provided to participants completing the behavioral task. (DOCX)