Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Mentor: Alexander Herman, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Project: Modulating working memory through the frontal pole in humans
When we make choices in our daily lives, sometimes we exert a great deal of mental effort to consider all possibilities before arriving at a decision. Other times we take the easy way out and decide based on simple rules and snap judgements. How does the brain regulate the amount of mental effort we spend when choosing between different courses of action? How do abnormalities in the brain’s ability to exert mental effort contribute to the decision-making deficits associated with psychiatric illnesses like drug addiction? The goal of Dr. Cunningham's research is to address these questions by measuring brain activity in humans performing cognitively challenging decision-making tasks. Their research has discovered that the prefrontal cortex regulates the amount of mental effort we exert when performing difficult tasks and making complex choices. Interestingly, it does so in the same way regardless of whether the exertion of effort is self-imposed (i.e., I want to think carefully to make a good decision even though nobody is forcing me to) or forced by the task at hand (i.e., I’m working on a very hard task and the only way to achieve my goal is to think long and hard). A better understanding of how the brain regulates mental effort can fuel the development of new and more effective therapeutic techniques (e.g., targeted brain stimulation) to improve the lives of those who suffer from psychiatric illnesses like drug addiction. Through this and related work, the prospect of using neurotherapeutic techniques to improve the way we make decisions and achieve our goals is slowly but surely becoming less of a science fiction pipe dream and more of a reality.
