research
Research at the CAMP Lab investigates how motivation, affect, and cognitive control interact in the brain — and how disruptions in these processes contribute to psychiatric disorders across the lifespan.
We investigate how reward and punishment signals are integrated in the brain to guide mental effort to support goal-directed behavior. Using a multimodal approach — neuroimaging, pharmacology, computational modeling, and neuromodulation — we examine how motivation, affect, and cognitive control interact, and how disruptions in these processes serve as transdiagnostic predictors of psychiatric disorders across the lifespan.
Motivation, Affect, and Cognitive Control Across the Lifespan
How do motivational signals shape how much mental effort we invest in a task — and how does this change with age? We examine how primary and secondary incentives are integrated within corticostriatal and prefrontal-limbic circuits to guide behavior. Using fMRI, Bayesian multilevel modeling, and drift-diffusion models, we characterize how motivation and arousal dissociate in their effects on behavior across the adult lifespan, with implications for healthy aging and conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Stress, Pharmacology, and Neuromodulation
We investigate how neurotransmitter systems — including serotonin — shape stress, cognitive control, and affective responding. Using a novel task that pairs mild stressors with a working memory challenge, we examine how the predictability and controllability of stressors influence effort allocation and emotional response. We combine these paradigms with pharmacological manipulations (e.g., SSRIs) and neuromodulation techniques alongside fMRI to probe these mechanisms across behavioral, cognitive, and neural levels.
Computational Psychiatry and Digital Mental Health
We apply computational modeling to characterize transdiagnostic processes underlying psychiatric symptom variability — including depression, anxiety, and trauma — with the goal of developing neurocomputational markers that guide therapeutic interventions. We also extend this work into real-world settings, examining whether physiological signals from wearable devices — including heart rate and sleep captured via the Oura Ring — track mental health outcomes and relate to motivational and affective processes measured in the lab.