Pendleton Read Montague

Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) | VT · Department of Physics

Expectations shape our perception, profoundly influencing how we interpret the world. Positive expectations about sensory stimuli can alleviate distress and reduce pain (e.g., placebo effect), while negative expectations may heighten anxiety and exacerbate pain (e.g., nocebo effect). To investigate the impact of the (an)hedonic aspect of expectatio...

Generalising information from ourselves to others, and others to ourselves allows for both a dependable source of navigation and adaptability in interpersonal exchange. Disturbances to social development in sensitive periods can cause enduring and distressing damage to lasting healthy relationships. However, identifying the mechanisms of healthy ex...

Background Experiences of childhood maltreatment have been shown to be a crucial predictor of depressive symptoms. Objective This study investigated the association between a history of maltreatment and depressive symptoms in a mixed sample of adults, exploring whether feelings of shame and impairments in mentalizing mediate this association and p...

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a region of the brain that in humans is involved in the production of higher-order functions such as cognition, emotion, perception, and behavior. Neurotransmission in the PFC produces higher-order functions by integrating information from other areas of the brain. At the foundation of neurotransmission, and by extens...

Bayesian decision theory suggests that optimal decision-making should use and weigh prior beliefs with current information, according to their relative uncertainties. However, some characteristics of borderline personality disorder (BPD) patients, such as fast, drastic changes in the overall perception of themselves and others, suggest they may be...

Introduction Although the COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected wellbeing of at-risk groups, most research on resilience employed convenience samples. We investigated psychosocial resilience and risk factors (RFs) for the wellbeing of psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, an under-researched population that provides essential su...

In the mammalian brain, midbrain dopamine neuron activity is hypothesized to encode reward prediction errors that promote learning and guide behavior by causing rapid changes in dopamine levels in target brain regions. This hypothesis (and alternatives regarding dopamine’s role in punishment-learning) has limited direct evidence in humans. We repor...

The noradrenaline (NA) system is one of the brain’s major neuromodulatory systems; it originates in a small midbrain nucleus, the locus coeruleus (LC), and projects widely throughout the brain.¹,² The LC-NA system is believed to regulate arousal and attention³,⁴ and is a pharmacological target in multiple clinical conditions.⁵,⁶,⁷ Yet our understan...

Background: Impulse Control Disorder (ICD) in Parkinson's disease is a behavioral addiction arising secondary to dopaminergic therapies, most often dopamine receptor agonists. Prior research implicates changes in striatal function and heightened dopaminergic activity in the dorsal striatum of patients with ICD. However, this prior work does not pos...

BACKGROUND Although the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has severely affected wellbeing of at-risk groups, most research on resilience employed convenience samples. OBJECTIVE We investigated psychosocial resilience and risk factors (RFs) for the wellbeing of psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, an under-researched population that provides e...

We examined multiple deep neural network (DNN) architectures for suitability in predicting neurotransmitter concentrations from labeled in vitro fast scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) data collected on carbon fiber electrodes. Suitability is determined by the predictive performance in the "out-of-probe" case, the response to artificially induced elect...

A current direction of personality disorder research strives to identify key behavioural, cognitive, and ultimately computational facets of patient functioning via the use of engaging social paradigms. Thus far, few such paradigms have been put forward. Here, we introduce a novel task in which subjects interact with previously unknown virtual partn...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) organizes phenotypes of mental disorder based on empirical covariation, offering a comprehensive organizational framework from narrow symptoms to broader patterns of psychopathology. We argue that established self‐report measures of psychopathology from the pre‐HiTOP era should be systematically...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) organizes phenotypes of mental disorder based on empirical covariation, offering a comprehensive organizational framework from narrow symptoms to broader patterns of psychopathology. We argue that established self-report measures of psychopathology from the pre-HiTOP era should be systematically...

Information exchange between brain regions is key to understanding information processing for social decision-making, but most analyses ignore its dynamic nature. New insights on this dynamic might help us to uncover the neural correlates of social cognition in the healthy population and also to understand the malfunctioning neural computations und...

Personality functioning and psychopathology are interrelated, yet clinically they are demarcated. Diagnostically, we can distinguish between affective disorders and personality disorders, but there is overlap between features, and the interrelationship between these features may be important in the consideration of treatment approaches. Taking an i...

Background Although the relationship between childhood maltreatment, self-harm and suicidality is well-established, less is known about the mediating mechanisms explaining it. Based on a developmental mentalisation-based theoretical framework, childhood adversity compromises mentalising ability and attachment security, which in turn increase vulner...

Existing research presents a working understanding of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) patients’ symptomatology, traits, and behavior in everyday life, but how they combine and utilize prior and likelihood (current sensory) information when making decisions remains unclear. Bayesian Decision Theory suggests that optimal decision-making behavio...

Dissociation is a clinical phenomenon wherein the normal continuity between aspects of consciousness and experience is disrupted. Pathological dissociative symptoms are present in a number of psychiatric disorders, yet the brain bases of dissociation have primarily been examined within single disorders and findings do not converge across study samp...

Investing in strangers in a socio-economic exchange is risky, as we may be uncertain whether they will reciprocate. Nevertheless, the potential rewards for cooperating can be great. Here, we used a cross sectional sample (n = 784) to study how the challenges of cooperation versus defection are negotiated across an important period of the lifespan:...

Machine learning advances in electrochemical detection have recently produced subsecond and concurrent detection of dopamine and serotonin during perception and action tasks in conscious humans. Here, we present a new machine learning approach to subsecond, concurrent separation of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. The method exploits a low...

Background Functional connectivity measures have garnered interest as possible biomarkers of psychiatric disorders including borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, small sample sizes and lack of within-study replications have led to divergent findings with no clear spatial foci. Therefore, we adopted an exploratory full-brain approach in t...

Although the relationship between childhood trauma, self-harm and suicidality is well-established, less is known about the mediating mechanisms explaining it. Based on a developmental mentalisation-based theoretical framework, childhood adversity compromises mentalising ability and attachment security, which in turn increase vulnerability to later...

Interpersonal problems are a core symptom of borderline personality disorder (BPD). In particular, patients with BPD exhibit a heightened sensitivity to cues of acceptance or rejection in their relationships. The current study investigated the psychological processes underpinning this heightened responsiveness. In a between-subjects design, we impl...

Human prosocial behaviors are constantly shaped by the push-and-pull between societal need for cooperation and one’s natural tendency to self-prioritize. Nevertheless, it remains elusive how our valuation and perceptual systems might contribute to altruistic acts under the influence of a real-world crisis. Here, using computational modeling and a g...

Background Bulimia nervosa (BN) is a complex psychiatric illness that includes binge-purge behaviors and a belief that one’s value as a person depends on body shape and weight. Social pressure strongly influences the development and maintenance of BN, but how this manifests neurobiologically within an individual remains unknown. We utilized a compu...

Recent animal research indicates that dopamine and serotonin, neuromodulators traditionally linked to appetitive and aversive processes, are also involved in sensory inference and decisions based on such inference. We tested this hypothesis in humans by monitoring sub-second striatal dopamine and serotonin signaling during a visual motion discrimin...

Investing in strangers in a socio-economic exchange is risky, as we may be uncertain whether they will reciprocate. Nevertheless, the potential rewards for cooperating can be great. Here, we used a cross sectional sample (n = 784) to study how the challenges of cooperation versus defection are negotiated across an important period of the lifespan:...

Introduction: Exposure to traumatic stressful events in childhood is an important risk factor for the development of posttraumatic symptomatology. From a mentalization-based developmental perspective, childhood adversity can affect attachment in children and may result in insecure attachment and impaired mentalizing abilities, which increase the l...

Humans tend to discount information that undermines past choices and judgments. This confirmation bias has significant impact on domains ranging from politics to science and education. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this fundamental characteristic of belief formation. Here we report a mechanism underlying the confirmation bias. Spe...

Interpersonal problems are key transdiagnostic constructs in psychopathology. In the past, investigators have neglected the importance of operationalizing interpersonal problems according to their latent structure by using divergent representations of the construct: (a) computing scores for severity, agency, and communion (“dimensional approach”),...

Reward-based decision making is thought to be driven by at least two different types of decision systems: a simple stimulus–response cache-based system which embodies the common-sense notion of “habit,” for which model-free reinforcement learning serves as a computational substrate, and a more deliberate, prospective, model-based planning system. P...

Interpersonal problems are key transdiagnostic constructs in psychopathology. In the past, investigators have neglected the importance of operationalizing interpersonal problems according to their latent structure by using divergent representations of the construct: (a) computing scores for severity, agency, and communion (“dimensional approach”),...

Activity changes in dopaminergic neurons encode the ongoing discrepancy between expected and actual value of a stimulus, providing a teaching signal for a reward prediction process. Previous work comparing a cohort of long-term Zen meditators to controls demonstrated an attenuation of reward prediction signals to appetitive reward in the striatum....

We summarize a new approach to neuromodulator detection that provides colocalized detection of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine at subsecond timescales and promises to provide submillisecond estimates of the same. The methodology, elastic net electrochemistry, is used to estimate dopamine and serotonin in the striatum of conscious human subj...

We introduce a random sensing approach to neurotransmitter detection that provides concurrent, co-localized detection of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine and pH. The approach generates high quality out-of-sample predictions at 10 milliseconds per estimate. Similar high-quality estimates result when the data are down-sampled suggesting that even...

From an early age, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)spend less time engaged in social interaction compared to typically developing peers (TD). One reason behind this behavior may be that the brains of children diagnosed with ASD do not attribute enough value to potential social exchanges as compared to the brains of typically developi...

Interpersonal problems are a core symptom of borderline personality disorder (BPD). This study investigated the relationship between emotion dysregulation, impulsiveness, and impaired mentalizing in the context of predicting interpersonal problems in BPD. A total of 210 patients with BPD completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)...

Early childhood educational investment produces positive effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills, health, and socio-economic success. However, the effects of such interventions on social decision-making later in life are unknown. We recalled participants from one of the oldest randomized controlled studies of early childhood investment-the Ab...

Cooperation and competition between human players in repeated microeconomic games offer a window onto social phenomena such as the establishment, breakdown and repair of trust. However, although a suitable starting point for the quantitative analysis of such games exists, namely the Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (I-POMDP)...

Summarized supplementary material. Details on various more computational aspects of the model and its implementation. It is divided into chapters: “Theory of Mind Limitation”, “Planning”, “Model Selection”, “Risk Aversion”, “Quantitative Illustration of Irritability”, “Parameter Recoverability”, “Algorithmic Representation” and “Predicitve Validty...

The role of serotonin in human brain function remains elusive due, at least in part, to our inability to measure rapidly the local concentration of this neurotransmitter. We used fast-scan cyclic voltammetry to infer serotonergic signaling from the striatum of fourteen brains of human patients with Parkinson’s disease. Here we report these novel me...

Impression management, as one of the most essential skills of social function, impacts one's survival and success in human societies. However, the neural architecture underpinning this social skill remains poorly understood. By employing a two-person bargaining game, we exposed three strategies involving distinct cognitive processes for social impr...

As models of shared expectations, social norms play an essential role in our societies. Since our social environment is changing constantly, our internal models of it also need to change. In humans, there is mounting evidence that neural structures such as the insula and the ventral striatum are involved in detecting norm violation and updating int...

A cartoon description of the goals of cognitive science and neuroscience might read respectively “How the mind works” and “How the brain works.” In this caricature, there would seem to be little overlap in the vocabularies employed by each domain. The cartoon cognitive scientist could speak at length about decision making and short‐term memory in a...

Significance Because criminal statutes demand it, juries often must assess criminal intent by determining which of two legally defined mental states a defendant was in when committing a crime. For instance, did the defendant know he was carrying drugs, or was he merely aware of a risk that he was? Legal scholars have debated whether that conceptual...

The laboratory study of how humans and other animals trade-off value and time has a long and storied history, and is the subject of a vast literature. However, despite a long history of study, there is no agreed upon mechanistic explanation of how intertemporal choice preferences arise. Several theorists have recently proposed model-based reinforce...

Psychiatrists and neuroscientists discuss the potential of computational approaches to address problems in psychiatry including diagnosis, treatment, and integration with neurobiology. Modern psychiatry is at a crossroads, as it attempts to balance neurological analysis with psychological assessment. Computational neuroscience offers a new lens thr...

Scientists and clinicians can utilize a model-based framework to develop computational approaches to psychiatric practice and bring scientific discoveries to a clinical interface. This chapter describes a general modeling perspective, which complements those derived in previous chapters, and provides distinct examples to highlight the scientific an...

Recent experiments suggest that subsecond dopamine delivery to human striatum encodes a combination of reward prediction errors and counterfactual errors thus composing the actual with the possible into one neurochemical signal. Here, we present a model where the counterfactual part of these striatal dopamine fluctuations originates in another valu...

Activity in midbrain dopamine neurons modulates the release of dopamine in terminal structures including the striatum, and controls reward-dependent valuation and choice. This fluctuating release of dopamine is thought to encode reward prediction error (RPE) signals and other value-related information crucial to decision-making, and such models hav...

Cocaine users have a higher incidence of risky sexual behavior and HIV infection than nonusers. Our aim was to measure whether safer sex discount rates-a measure of the likelihood of having immediate unprotected sex versus waiting to have safer sex-differed between controls and cocaine users of varying severity. Of the 162 individuals included in t...

Little is known about the specific neural mechanisms through which cognitive factors influence craving and associated brain responses, despite the initial success of cognitive therapies in treating drug addiction. In this study, we investigated how cognitive factors such as beliefs influence subjective craving and neural activities in nicotine-addi...

Anorexia nervosa is a severe mental illness characterized by problems with selfperception. Whole-brain neural activations in healthy women, women with anorexia nervosa, and women in long-term weight recovery following anorexia nervosa were compared using two functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks probing different aspects of self-perception. T...

Emotions have been shown to exert influences on decision making during economic exchanges. Here we investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of a training regimen which is hypothesized to promote emotional awareness, specifically mindfulness training (MT). We test the hypothesis that MT increases cooperative economic decision making using fMRI i...

The habenula is a hub for cognitive and emotional signals that are relayed to the aminergic centers in the midbrain and, thus, plays an important role in goal-oriented behaviors. Although it is well described in rodents and non-human primates, the habenula functional network remains relatively uncharacterized in humans, partly because of the method...

Contemporary psychiatry faces major challenges. Its syndrome-based disease classification is not based on mechanisms and does not guide treatment, which largely depends on trial and error. The development of therapies is hindered by ignorance of potential beneficiary patient subgroups. Neuroscientific and genetics research have yet to affect diseas...

This is the second of two companion papers proposing priority problems for research on mental disorders. Whereas the first paper focuses on questions of nosology and diagnosis, this Personal View concerns pathogenesis and aetiology of psychiatric diseases. We hope that this (non-exhaustive and subjective) list of problems, nominated by scientists a...

In anorexia nervosa, problems with social relationships contribute to illness, and improvements in social support are associated with recovery. Using the multiround trust game and 3T MRI, we compare neural responses in a social relationship in three groups of women: women with anorexia nervosa, women in long-term weight recovery from anorexia nervo...

Trust is fundamental to all human exchange. It is therefore necessary to understand the behavioural logic and neural underpinnings of how it is established, maintained, broken, and repaired. There are open evolutionary questions about how trust mechanisms should and do evolve; however, here we focus on more proximate psychological and neural mechan...

Reinforcement learning models have demonstrated that phasic activity of dopamine neurons during reward expectation encodes information about the predictability of reward and cues that predict reward. Self-control strategies such as those practiced in mindfulness-based approaches is claimed to reduce negative and positive reactions to stimuli sugges...

Significance Nicotine is the primary addictive substance in tobacco, which stimulates neural pathways mediating reward processing. However, pure biochemical explanations are not sufficient to account for the difficulty in quitting and remaining smoke-free among smokers, and in fact cognitive factors are now considered to contribute critically to ad...

Social norms and their enforcement are fundamental to human societies. The ability to detect deviations from norms and to adapt to norms in a changing environment is therefore important to individuals' normal social functioning. Previous neuroimaging studies have highlighted the involvement of the insular and ventromedial prefrontal (vmPFC) cortice...