Grant: CIHR Fellowship

The ability to make optimal decisions is often altered in mental health conditions such as autism, eating disorders, substance addiction and depression. This impairment could contribute to the rigid and maladapted behaviours sometimes observed in these conditions. For example, persons with these conditions might favour high risk - high reward choices instead of the more advantageous low risk - moderate reward alternatives. Recent theoretical models suggest that our ability to make decisions often rely on our ability to perceive our own body. Indeed, bodily perception, also called interoception, can make one's aware of subtle emotional cues that are useful to guide decision making (e.g. increased heart rate, faster breathing). It is therefore possible that impaired bodily perception is responsible for the decision-making difficulties observed in these conditions. The current proposal aims to test this hypothesis by measuring interoception and decision-making abilities in a large non-clinical sample and in multiple clinical groups. Decision-making abilities will be measured using tasks in which participants are requested to make choices involving different consequences for them and others (e.g. receive a reward while their partner receives a punishment) or to make choices with a different risk/reward trade-off. Interoceptive abilities will be measured using tasks that require participants to count their heartbeats, to assess the strength of their respiration or to assess the temperature of a liquid in their mouth. This project has the potential to identify a common explanation for decision making difficulties observed in several psychiatric conditions. This could in turn lead to significant changes in our conception of these conditions and to new therapeutic approaches aimed at improving interoception in these patients.