Silvia Lopez-Guzman, M.D., Ph.D.

Research Topics

The decisions we make are a central feature of who we are as individuals. They have consequences that affect us directly and influence the people around us. Decisions can manifest in overt behavior, but they reflect the inner workings of a complex network of brain areas that include subcortical structures in the brainstem and basal ganglia, as well as regions of parietal, temporal, and prefrontal cortex. This circuit processes noisy information from external (exteroceptive) and internal (interoceptive) inputs in a state- and context-dependent way, influenced by prior learning and experience and by our individuality (personal preferences). In many mental health conditions, ranging from depression to substance use disorder, decision-making is altered, sometimes leading a person to put themselves or others at risk of serious outcomes.

The Computational Decision Neuroscience lab studies how the computations that subserve decision making are implemented in the brain and how this may be different in individuals with mental illness. States of decompensation or exacerbated symptomatology, often brought about by increased stress, incidental negative emotion, and pain, are of special interest because they present opportunities for deploying interventions that could prevent negative outcomes. Our group combines economic theory-inspired behavioral tasks, biosensor data, passive and active mobile device data, clinical information, model-based fMRI, and computational modeling to understand how these states influence value representations and computations that underlie intertemporal decisions, decisions under uncertainty, and higher-order reasoning about those decisions.