Professor of Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge | Deputy Head of the School of Biological Sciences | Senior Affiliated Scientist at MRC CBU | Fellow at Clare College | 🏳️🌈| www.lawsonlab.co.uk |
Prof. Rebecca Lawson
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In the context of a motor learning task, we show that the way people update beliefs under uncertainty maps onto excitatory neurochemistry in motor cortex. Higher M1 Glx was tied to stronger prediction-error updates and lower inferred volatility.
This one was featured in the @natcomms.nature.com editors highlights page - a lovely recognition of the quality and importance of this work. Well done team!
Even though uncertainty processing is tightly linked to anxiety, we found these computational signatures were not simply explained by trait anxiety. However, individuals higher in trait anxiety were faster after the reversal of the task-structure suggesting they adapted more quickly to change.
This opens exciting avenues: for example, exploring whether similar neurochemical-computational links exist in value-based or affective learning settings (where anxiety might play a stronger role).
This work challenges deficit-oriented narratives around perception in autism and highlights shared strengths of implicit perceptual cohesion across neurodiversity.
In this large-scale (n = 470) pre-registered online behavioural study involving two different tasks - no significant group differences emerged.
