On 19 September, Jan Peters (Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Cologne) visits to give the first talk in this semester’s SWE Colloquia series.

Value-based decision-making in gambling disorders

Gambling disorder is a behavioural addiction that shares core features with substance-use disorders, in particular in the areas of decision-making and cognitive control. First, I will present data from a restless bandit task showing that gambling disorder attenuates directed exploration during reinforcement learning, a process that I will show in a pharmacological approach in healthy controls under dopaminergic control. I will then show that reinforcement learning impairments in gamblers also extend to simpler stationary environments. In the second part of my talk, I will show data from a behavioural study in real-world contextual settings highlighting that gambling-related environments can substantially potentiate decision-making impairments in gamblers, a finding that will be discussed in the context of transdiagnostic processes in psychiatry. If time permits, I will finally discuss data on the role of frontal dopamine in risky decision-making in gambling disorder. Taken together, findings highlight how specific impairments in gambling disorder can be further characterised via computational modelling, and how these processes are shaped by environmental factors.